Top 67 Quotes About Meanings Of Words
#1. The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us.
S.I. Hayakawa
#2. Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#3. In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
Paul Auster
#4. Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.
John Crowe Ransom
#5. How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.
Joyce Carol Oates
#6. Muslims have different meanings for the same words that we use. They are so convinced of the "truth" of Islam that they do not perceive Jihad/terrorism, or dhimmitude as violence.
Ali Sina
#7. Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing; there's the art of almost anything that you can say.
Wayne Thiebaud
#8. You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.
Mortimer J. Adler
#9. My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets - no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Philip Roth
#10. I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.
Lewis Carroll
#11. When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.
Owen Barfield
#12. Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise.
Karl R. Popper
#13. Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.
Nadia Boulanger
#14. When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.
Pattiann Rogers
#15. The English Language is a form of communication! Words aren't only bombs and bullets - no, they're little gifts, containing meanings. What is true in love, is equally true at law
Phillip Roth
#16. Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words - often ironic and self-deprecating - are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#17. That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.
T. S. Eliot
#18. A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.
John Steinbeck
#19. Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?
Dean Koontz
#20. You never feel more aware of what it means to be alive than when you're falling in love. Or dying.
Kate Bassett
#21. As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.
Alberto Manguel
#22. Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
Marcel Proust
#23. Unlike her judges, she suggested that words do not have set meanings, that there is a gap between speaker and listener, and that human understanding always "falls short of absolute truth.
Eve LaPlante
#24. Healing must always seek to give voice to suffering, and the greater the range of words and meanings we have at our disposal, the clearer the voice becomes.
Iona Heath in BMJ 2000;320:125 ( 8 January) Review of the book Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age by David Morris
Iona Heath
#25. I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.
Harlan Ellison
#26. If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words that can be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary.
Louis Menand
#27. Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#28. I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room
a complete mess
so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.
William H Gass
#29. My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.
Frances Hardinge
#30. If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.
John Dewey
#31. Having all these lies so that you could feel special. It's time to let go of fantasy and imagined problems. It's time to embrace the crude and harsh truths.
That the existents, the discourses, the frameworks, your words, your meanings, and your definitions, all begin to fade, away, again
Camilo Garzon
#32. Lord Vetinari in a meeting: what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That's where the things were that they hoped he didn't know and didn't want him to find out.
Terry Pratchett
#33. There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.
Tom Waits
#34. 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
#35. Rhyme patterns are nothing without meanings to the words. A lot of rappers can do those flows, but the raps aren't really about anything - which is cool sometimes, but to have the flow and the message is one of my favorite things.
J. Cole
#36. Light is my inspiration. My photographic images search for dimensions that words cannot touch- the result of intense responses to personal experiences. I do not wish to "record," but rather to touch upon the illusive meanings which I perceive and try to comprehend in this limitless universe.
Ruth Bernhard
#37. And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings - the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.
Simon Winchester
#38. Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.
Blaise Pascal
#39. (Emerson's) aphorisms tend to be chicken soup for the academic soul or gobledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.
Micah Mattix
#40. Silence is a great companion when words are devoid of meanings.
Nema Al-Araby
#41. At all periods of the [English] language it is difficult to assign a beginning date to most new words and meanings. They tend to slip into the language silently, and are placed in date order only when scholars subsequently get to work.
Robert Burchfield
#43. We singers have a different level of responsibility from other musicians. We have words that we must convey; we have meanings that we must convey through these lyrics.
Jessye Norman
#44. So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.
John Locke
#45. Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.
Sanford Meisner
#46. Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#47. Words have very potent meanings and people read them and they react to them personally. They are very suggestive in terms of your life and things like that.
Robert Barry
#48. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
Robert Hughes
#49. Everybody complains that politics separates words from their meanings, and this is part of the reason why. Words are useful, but often their meanings are not. Sometimes what you want is feeling rather than meaning, warmth rather than content. And that takes verbiage. The
Barton Swaim
#50. Wake up to think of words ... want to walk through pages of meanings, the links in assonance, alliteration, or just simple sense that moves the eye to leap that way to the next-door play of sound and resonance.
Initially NO
#51. ...Newspapers, popular fiction, and magazines churned out words by the million, and the worn coins of everyday speech were less and less able to communicate anything more than the most commonplace meanings....
Lachman Gary Larkin Steve
#52. For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.
Barack Obama
#53. If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.
Rose Macaulay
#54. Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,
and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,
and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.
Remy De Gourmont
#55. The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#56. In every cell in every body in every living thing, strings of words make sentences, meanings locked together
Johnny Rich
#57. Take words and make them useful,' she told me. 'drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean and make them mean something useful instead.
Scott Bradfield
#58. A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you.
John Steinbeck
#59. None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#60. There are several different meanings of the words religion and spirituality, all of which are important. The whole point about an integral or comprehensive approach is that it must find a way to believably include all of those important meanings in a coherent whole.
Ken Wilber
#61. Logan spoke Badass.
There were only a few words in the Vocabulary of Badass but each one had a number of meanings. They included beautiful, Christ, fuck, Jesus, and shit.
But the one used most was babe.
Kristen Ashley
#62. Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin ... Writing as a lesser form of dance.
Paul Auster
#64. The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.
Jorie Graham
#65. The kingdom of God is not in words. Words are only incidental and can never be fundamental. When evangelicalism ceased to emphasize fundamental meanings and began emphasizing fundamental words, and shifted from meaning to words and from power to words, they began to go down hill.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#66. It is nonetheless the best usage that decides the meaning of words.
Wilson Follett
#67. If it's a language you don't understand and you're not concerned with the meanings of the words, your impression comes from how the words look, particularly if the language uses different characters.
Squarepusher
