quotations about words
One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Death with Interruptions
Words are but the shining garments of Thought.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Mill on the Floss
All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Words which enlighten some darken others.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The words of God are deeds.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Words frequently surrender power to the opposer.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.
ROBERT ALTMAN
Esquire, March 2004
Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Words once sequenced into phrases were never done with but recycled themselves in perpetuity.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Word -- that invisible dagger.
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...
ANNE CARSON
Nox
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,
Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one's experiences in common.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Lord of Light
By words the mind is winged.
ARISTOPHANES
The Birds