meaning

Not everything that can be counted counts.Not everything that counts can be counted.

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

Finding meaning in the moment is what gives those meanings a value worth remembering.

Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.

Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.

Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral.

Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, "I did see a few Indians on the way over here." And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, 'Don't worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren't any there.' I don't remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?

I take a picture, but it's not about who is in the picture or the background of it. It's about the memories and meanings it holds.

Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.

It is not always necessary to search for the cause behind everything, because every cause is unfounded. A cause only looks like a cause from a certain viewpoint.

If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?

I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?

If you cannot create a meaning, the things you see will always look meaningless to you!

Here, her hand in mine was the one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell. I rubbed her hand and she sighed; wasn__ that meaning? Wasn__ that something we could cling to? I could be with this other. I could form no other relation, but maybe her hand in mine was enough, both sufficient and necessary. In Hell there was no sense of place, because all places were the same. Uniform monotony. A place without place. A place without context. But, here, now, I could rub her hand and she would sigh. She was a difference. Perhaps each person was the only difference in all these halls of unchanging ranks of books, kiosks, clocks, and carpet, and that, and that, at least, we had to hold to.

I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.