Meaning Making Quotes

“The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty... not to reassure him, but to upset him.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“After a tragedy, a farce. Philosophy enters into her power, and the earth returns under one's feet.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“But nobody has ever yet called a philosopher "a hired conscience," though everybody gives the lawyer this nickname. Why this partiality?”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“It occurred to me anyway one more Sunday was over, … that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“We cannot live without meaning, that would preclude any sense of identity, any hope, any future.”
― Carlina Rinaldi

“The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that humans are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking’ animals. In our species, he says, ‘the drive to make sense out of our experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs.’ To Geertz, a human being is an organism ‘which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.”
― Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture

“One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces