Epigram 03

…[The sociologist's] data, however, are the already constituted meanings of active participants in the social world. It is to these already meaningful data that [the sociologist's] scientific concepts must ultimately refer: to the meaningful acts of individual men and women, to their everyday experience of one another, to their understanding of one another's meanings, and to their initiation of new meaningful behavior of their own. [The sociologist] will be concerned, furthermore, with the concepts people have of the meaning of their own and others' behavior and the concepts they have of the meaning of artifacts of all kinds.

Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, pp. 9-10.