Quotes About Meaning Of Words

#1. the ultimate meaning of words cannot be found in what the listener hears but in what he listens to upon hearing

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#2. Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like.

Joseph Sobran

#3. I realize that definitions spark controversy and disagreement, but I'm okay with that. I'd rather we debate the meaning of words that are important to us than not discuss them at all.

Brene Brown

#4. The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

Philip K. Dick

#5. Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us.

Frances Wright

#6. Grammar and spelling are a part of thought process.
If one knows the meaning of words, one may be able to better understand the meaning of everything.

Sienna McQuillen

#7. Sex makes bumble-tongued fools even out of the most eloquent, but the beauty of it is that it also tunes our ears to hear the meaning of words that, spoken under other circumstances, would make us laugh or cry or frown.

Megan Hart

#8. Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Katherine Mansfield

#9. How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

Samuel Adams

#10. Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.

Bell Hooks

#11. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things ... Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of man.

Thucydides

#12. It is nonetheless the best usage that decides the meaning of words.

Wilson Follett

#13. Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.

Constance Hale

#14. Today the apologists of socialism are forced to distort facts and to misrepresent the manifest meaning of words when they want to make people believe in the compatibility of socialism and freedom.

Ludwig Von Mises

#15. He wished the man would honor the true meaning of words, instead of using them as ammunition.

Rachel Joyce

#16. What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.

V.S. Ramachandran

#17. How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

Edmond Jabes

#18. If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature.

Steven Weinberg

#19. In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.

Mason Cooley

#20. The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education.

Antisthenes

#21. The world of public discourse - political, social, diplomatic, commercial - has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of their veracity. Language has been turned on its head.

Deena Metzger

#22. The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude ... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.

Piet Mondrian

#23. If we accept that there is no such thing as 'zero risk' then we should not spin the meaning of words with assertions such as 'all accidents are preventable'.

Rob Long

#24. Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Guy Debord

#25. Our vocabulary may become a real time algorithmic word bank.
Could you imagine having a conversation like that?
Where the meaning of words constantly adapts?

Natasha Tsakos

#26. For it was not so much that by means of words I came to a complete understanding of things, as that from things I somehow had an experience which enabled me to follow the meaning of words.

Plutarch

#27. We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it.

John Cage

#28. Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#29. I hadn't grasped how days could be at once long and short. Long, no doubt, as periods to live through, but so distended that they ended up by overlapping on each other. In fact, I never thought of days as such; only the words 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still kept some meaning.

Albert Camus

#30. We can only be enlightened to the meaning of wise words
only and only if life have put and made us requiring them.

Toba Beta

#31. And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Ezra Pound

#32. Experience is beyond knowledge, words and speech.
It is experience which shows us the real meaning of life.

Gian Kumar

#33. The perception of meaning, as I see it, more specifically boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or, to express it in plain words, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.

Viktor E. Frankl

#34. So many thoughts ran through my head. Most of them contained the same, simply three words so often strung together that it was too much a classic cheese or cliche to say it, but they still had meaning, no matter how many times they had been repeated.

Alysha Speer

#35. When you truly know the meaning of the word love, you will also know the meaning of the word pain.

Javan

#36. The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.

E.B. White

#37. For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.

Katha Pollitt

#38. The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.

Malidoma Patrice Some

#39. Wisdom is not in words; Wisdom is meaning within words.

Khalil Gibran

#40. It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.

Madeleine L'Engle

#41. The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,
words with little meaning, actions with little worth,
one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.

Thomas Carlyle

#42. Love' was a word I had cheapened with overuse over the years, bleeding it dry of meaning by saying it purely from force of habit, or to convince myself of something of which I was far from sure. I wanted to wait until the words started to feel meaningful again before I used them.

Catherine Sanderson

#43. The assertion fallacy ... is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.

John Searle

#44. God is not all that interested in your grammar. He is interested in the meaning of your grammar!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#45. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.

G.K. Chesterton

#46. Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking, loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.

Elie Wiesel

#47. The pieces of my sister's body. I stood there, letting the meaning of those words sink in.

Otsuichi

#48. A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.

E.B. White

#49. We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

George Eliot

#50. It is not the reverence for words, but for their meaning that determines our deepness of comprehension of a given assertion about Nature.

Felix Alba-Juez

#51. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, / pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)

Friedrich Nietzsche

#52. My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

Elfriede Jelinek

#53. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

J.M. Coetzee

#54. Words enable us to transfer our thoughts from inside our own mind into the mind of another. They have the power to alter history, to describe the past, and to bring meaning and substance to the present.

Jim Rohn

#55. There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.

P.J. Harvey

#56. The words of musicals were the moral codes that I lived by. I found meaning and messages in musicals that I didn't find in churches or school books and it really made me come alive in a way.

Rosie O'Donnell

#57. Words have power.Their power doesn't merely emanate from the meaning they carry,but also hidden truth they leave behind.In what is left unsaid.

K.J. Kilton

#58. Better than a meaningless story of a thousand words is a single word of deep meaning which, when heard, produces peace.

Gautama Buddha

#59. In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

David Byrne

#60. How empty are the insincere words of people who, so easily, speak forth "love," "family" and "friendship" without meaning what they say even if their intentions are good albeit mere flattery.

Donna Lynn Hope

#61. Grammar is what gives sense to language ... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

David Crystal

#62. English is a beautiful language, a remarkably precise language with a million words to choose from to deliver your exact shade of meaning.

Laura Fraser

#63. Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.

Yang Wanli

#64. I Can't Live without You. expresses the full meaning of true love. It is a beautiful and powerful emotion, words can never express, nor can the mind comprehend its connection within two souls.

Ellen J. Barrier

#65. To see evil and call it good, mocks God. Worse, it makes goodness meaningless. A word without meaning is an abomination, for when the word passes beyond understanding the very thing the word stands for passes out of the world and cannot be recalled.

Stephen R. Lawhead

#66. The happiest people on Earth are the ones who know love.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

#67. Everything was going for me, I didn't even know the meaning of the word insecurity and suddenly I am surrounded by words like operation, cancer, chemotherapy, radiation.

Delta Goodrem

#68. Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.

Edmund Morgan

#69. I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.

Tim Burton

#70. Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.

Sanford Meisner

#71. Nobody will ever be able to understand the meaning of the measure of his own words.

Sorin Cerin

#72. As we have seen from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's example, even one justice can profoundly alter the meaning of those words for our citizens. Even one justice can deeply affect the rights and liberties of the American people.

Edward Kennedy

#73. All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Roland Barthes

#74. I was born into a profession in which my love of words, chosen with care for their meaning and nuance, was extremely important, not only to me, but also to the people with whom I worked with.

Francesco Quinn

#75. The breed clearly originated in Germany. The name Dachshund comes from two German words, "Dachs" which means badger and "Hund" which has the meaning of hound.

Patricia O'Grady

#76. Love, I've come to understand is more than three words mumbled before bedtime.

Nicholas Sparks

#77. A song is a favorite song, not because the singer can hit and hold a high note, but because of the words, their meaning.

Taylor Swift

#78. Everyone at the bar turned toward The Breeze and waited, as if the next few words he spoke would reveal the true meaning of life, the winning numbers of the lottery, and the unlisted phone number of God.

Christopher Moore

#79. To notice people's deceptions yet not reveal it in words, to bear people's insults without showing any change of attitude-there is endless meaning in this, and also endless function.

Zicheng Hong

#80. Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope.

Thomas Head Raddall

#81. The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

Vaclav Havel

#82. The words Socialism and Communism have the same meaning. They indicate a condition of society in which the wealth of the community: the land and the means of production, distribution and transport are held in common, production being for use and not for profit.

Sylvia Pankhurst

#83. Marrakesh is translated from the words Mur N'Akush in the Berber language meaning "Land of God.

Jake Tour

#84. People need things like that to go on living - mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations with these things. That's what I think.

Haruki Murakami

#85. Meaning beginns in the words, in the action, continues in your head and ends nowhere. There is no end to meaning. Meaning which is resolved, parcelled, labelled and ready for export is dead, impartient - and meaningless.

Pfister

#86. The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.

Jeanette Winterson

#87. If beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, they are defined by each other, so how do we know the meaning of either?

Ava Dellaira

#88. Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't.

Josiah Bartlett

#89. That boy don't know the meaning of the word fear. In fact, I just saw his grades, and that boy don't know the meaning of a lot of words.

Bobby Bowden

#90. Sometimes, we do not need a lot of words to convey meaning. For example, imagine a lovely sunset.

Richard Gentle

#91. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

Vladimir Nabokov

#92. Everything has an older meaning. All words have their secrets. Spells and gods are buried in the thicket of language.

Shannon Phillips

#93. I have to resort to email, and email is not enough. I am starting to get tired of relying on words. They are full of meaning, yes, but they lack sensation. Writing to her is not the same as seeing her face as she listens. Hearing back from her is not the same as hearing her voice.

David Levithan

#94. Politicians that proclaim big words without meaning rule in democracy. At best they allow themselves to discover that it's better to be rich and healthy than sick and poor and that it is necessary to care for 'good of Poland - clap clap, hurricane of clapping.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke

#95. The complexity embedded in the different levels of meaning that go along with the words "I love you" ought to be a whole mindfuck of a video game

Rachel Cohn

#96. We have all been hearing from childhood of such things as love, peace, charity, equality, and universal brotherhood; but they have become to us mere words without meaning, words which we repeat like parrots, and it has become quite natural for us to do so. We cannot help it.

Swami Vivekananda

#97. The power of speech does not rely upon meaning. Words carry energy all by themselves. They vibrate through the air, with the intention of the speaker, shaping consciousness and touching hearts whether understood or not.

Daniel Black

#98. Neither the inveterateness of the mischief, nor the prevalency of the fashion, shall be any excuse for those who will not take care about the meaning of their own words, and will not suffer the insignificancy of their expressions to be inquired into.

John Locke

#99. Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Paul Gauguin

#100. Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Haruki Murakami