William Morris Quotes

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

Everything's intentional. It's just filling in the dots.

I think structure is so deep in us. We put it in stories we tell our friends or in emails we write. We want it. It's how we create meaning.

There is in this Universe much of what seems to be design.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

Everything means something.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.

Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

No acts are random or wasted.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

In the works of Nature, purpose, not accident, is the main thing.

Every single line means something.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

Without context words and actions have no meaning at all

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

A single word often betrays a great design.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

A mighty maze! But not without a plan.

I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.