Significance Quotes - Page 22

• A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

  Stefan Zweig

  Historical, Atmosphere, Values

  Stefan Zweig (1955). “Stories and Legends”

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• In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.

  Edwin Land

  Building, International, Wretched

  "Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land" by Victor K. McElheny, (p. 198), 1998.

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• An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.

  Upton Sinclair

  Long, Events, May

  Upton Sinclair “100%: The Story of a Patriot”, Lulu.com

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• Divine things are too deep to be expressed by common words. The heavenly teachings are expressed in parable in order to be understood and preserved for ages to come. When the spiritually minded dive deeply into the ocean of their meaning they bring to the surface the pearls of their inner significance. There is no greater pleasure than to study God’s Word with a spiritual mind.

  Abdu'l-Bahá

  Spiritual, Ocean, Teaching

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• The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.

  Brion Gysin

  Real, Writing, Firsts

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• If we could understand the full significance of a woman's hat we could prophesy her clothes for the next year, the interior decoration of the next two years, the architecture of the next ten years, and we would have a fairly accurate notion of the pressures, political, economic and religious that go to make the shape of an age.

  James Laver

  Religious, Years, Two

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• The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

  Alain de Botton

  Greek, Rewards, Leisure

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble uses. She thus has for him a double, contradictory significance; she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance.

  Laura Riding

  Men, Romance, Noble

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• Most expositions of Aristotle's doctrines, when they have not been dictated by a spirit of virulent detraction, or unsympathetic indifference, have carefully suppressed all, or nearly all, the absurdities, and only retained what seemed plausible and consistent. But in this procedure their historical significance disappears.

  George Henry Lewes

  Historical, Doctrine, Spirit

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings”, p.9, London : Smith, Elder and Company

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• In my opinion, neither organisms nor organizations evolve slowly and surely into something better, but drift until some small change occurs which has immediate and overwhelming significance. The special role of the human being is not to wait for these favorable accidents but deliberately to introduce the small change that will have great significance.

  Edwin Land

  Small Changes, Organization, Waiting

  "Generation of Greatness : The Idea of a University in an Age of Science". Edwin Land's Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, groups.csail.mit.edu. May 22, 1957.

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• When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Men, Expression

  William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.54, New Directions Publishing

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• Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

  Jane Addams

  Men, Hands, Tools

  Jane Addams (2012). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.45, Courier Corporation

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• In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir's shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen.

  Kenneth Grahame

  Islands, Shy, Veils

  Kenneth Grahame, Seth Lerer (2009). “The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition”, p.155, Harvard University Press

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• The problem is this: in order to make money- lots of money- we don't need flawless literary masterpieces. What we need is mediocre rubbish, trash suitable for mass consumption. More and more, bigger and bigger blockbusters of less and less significance. What counts is the paper we sell, not the words that are printed on it.

  Walter Moers

  Order, Needs, Paper

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• Sometimes our celebrations of notable occurrences seem to take on earthly color, and we do not fully realize the significance of the reason for the celebration. This is true of Christmas, when too often we celebrate the holiday rather than the deep significance of the birth and resurrection of the Lord. They must be unhappy indeed who ignore the godship of Christ, the sonship of the Master.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Holiday, Color, Unhappy

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• There is no significance of God in my life, God is my life. I would not be, without God. I am supposed to be dead.

  Danny Trejo

  Supposed To Be, Without God

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe.

  Jack London

  Zero, Men, Imagination

  Jack London (2008). “To Build a Fire”, p.6, The Creative Company

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• The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Mean, Fate, Men

  "Solaris". Book by Stanisław Lem, translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. Chapter 8: "The Monsters", p. 120, 1970.

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• How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence... p 259

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Pain, Blessed, Thinking

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• I don't know the significance of this, but I find it very interesting.

  Stephen Chbosky

  Interesting, Very Interesting, Knows

  Stephen Chbosky (2013). “The Perks of Being a Wallflower YA edition”, p.53, Simon and Schuster

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• Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

  Clifford Geertz

  Men, Animal, Spun

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.5, Basic Books

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• Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of story? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with narrative without being suspected of 'significances' or symbolism or 'social trends'?

  Margaret Mitchell

  Reading, Symbolism, People

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• I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Believe, Fate, Successful

  Daniel Kahneman (2011). “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, p.299, Macmillan

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• Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said. “Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

  Haruki Murakami

  Revenge, Yield, Cost

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• If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Philosophical, Mean, Reality

  Lawrence M. Krauss (2012). “A Universe From Nothing”, p.139, Simon and Schuster

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