Top 100 Quotes About Words And Meaning
#1. From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.
Eyvind Johnson
#2. Get rid of words and meaning, and there is still poetry.
Yang Wanli
#3. During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.
Sol LeWitt
#4. 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
#5. When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.
Akshay Vasu
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The word 'Terror' is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.
Jim Corbett
#10. 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
#11. Experience is beyond knowledge, words and speech.
It is experience which shows us the real meaning of life.
Gian Kumar
#12. Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.
Rose Macaulay
#13. Words cannot only be made ... But made to have a meaning, free the tongue and continue your speech.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#14. Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.
Benjamin Franklin
#15. 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
#16. Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning ...
Fay Weldon
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Words have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbits and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.
David Lehman
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. In nearly all ballads, the words set the mood and meaning, while the music intensifies or enhances them.
Kate Smith
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. People don't follow words; they follow conviction and without conviction the words are meaningless.
Jennifer Ott
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.
Yang Wanli
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. What did the mat say to the door? You must be really aDOORable to open up to everyone who knock at you. And I welcome everyone and what do I get? People stepping all over me
Ana Claudia Antunes
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.
Kenneth Branagh
#49. The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.
Aaron Copland
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round.
Maurice Maeterlinck
#54. 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
#55. Everything has an older meaning. All words have their secrets. Spells and gods are buried in the thicket of language.
Shannon Phillips
#56. Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart.
Criss Jami
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Ay! but mother's words are scarce, and weigh heavy. Father's liker me, and we talk a deal o' rubble; but mother's words are liker to hewn stone. She puts a deal o' meaning in 'em.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#65. In my opinion, animation is best when it communicates without words, because it is the perfect medium through which to make shortcuts to meaning. When actors are not talking, just acting out, it looks kind of weird. But in animation, mime is constant, and you accept it.
Signe Baumane
#66. It's natural. I freestyle, meaning that I just rap. I might put words on paper, but I just put a beat on my rap, and go off the top of my head. It's something I've been able to do for a long time.
Snoop Dogg
#67. 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
#68. Perhaps, then, the words male and female have no general meaning.
Richard Dawkins
#69. When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning - human meaning, that is - is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
#70. Each drop that fell,
had a story to tell.
each smile that curved,
said a million words.
(Poem: Our Existence, Book: Ginger and Honey)
Jasleen Kaur Gumber
#71. Either A is B or C is D," means, "if A is not B, C is D; and if C is not D, A is B." All hypothetical propositions, therefore, though disjunctive in form, are conditional in meaning; and the words hypothetical and conditional may be, as indeed they generally are, used synonymously.
John Stuart Mill
#72. 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
#73. The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commentaries of individual lives, and they gain an added mystery in each new revelation.
Rabindranath Tagore
#74. 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
#75. When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.
Albert Camus
#76. I want to read you every night. I want to take you to bed with me : your words, your thoughts, your mind, your body and your soul.
Avijeet Das
#77. Words have meaning beyond the obvious. Words have consequences beyond intentions. Civil words align risk and reward of such unknowns.
John R. Dallas Jr.
#78. For me, the intent in a song is to sing it. I compose songs, meaning I'm writing words to be set to music; I'm intending it to not be recited. I'm a singer-songwriter, and I'm a poet, and there really isn't a contradiction, at least for me.
Cornelius Eady
#79. The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.
Patrick O'Brian
#80. Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak; Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit, Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak, The folded meaning of your words' deceit.
William Shakespeare
#81. The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
Thomas Carlyle
#82. Love that defied trite words or even description, that carried with it tenderness and passion and laughter and friendship. Love that made her eyes sparkle and her breath stop when she saw him and imbued life with more meaning and more purpose.
Karen Ranney
#83. Where words lose their meaning, people lose their lives.
Confucius
#84. And at the end of the first twelvemonth had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterwards departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the world.
Charles Dickens
#85. to be a fiction writer, you also need to be a psychologist (understanding people's personalities and intentions), a philosopher (asking big questions about meaning and human nature), and a poet (breathing life into your words and the spaces between them).
Steven James
#86. The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.
Elan Mastai
#87. 'Brave' is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations. I never thought about anything as brave anymore; it just seemed like a flabby, glib cliche.
Susan Orlean
#88. Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.
N. Scott Momaday
#89. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#90. In infinite space and time everything develops, becomes more perfect and more complex, is differentiated,is to say nothing at all. Those are all words with no meaning, for in the infinite is neither complex nor simple, no forward nor backward, or better or worse.
Leo Tolstoy
#91. Silence is not absence of words. Silence is the space where words arise and dissolve. Without silence, words have no meaning
Rashmit Kalra
#92. I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, 'is not as natural as it looks.
Loren Eiseley
#93. How much better to follow a straight course and attain a goal where the words "pleasant" and "honourable" have the same meaning!
Seneca.
#94. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#95. I know some words floated through my ears, but my mind refused to absorb their meaning. I just shook my head slowly as the wall of pain washed over me, leaving me submerged and broken in the flood.
Leslie Deaton
#96. Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#97. Most of the words we use in history and everyday speech are like mental depth charges. As they descend [through our consciousness] and detonate, their resonant power is unleashed, showering our understanding with fragments of accumulated meaning and association.
James Axtell
#98. For Our Purposes, I define "reading" as looking at printed words and getting enough meaning from them to satisfy your purpose.
Peter Kump
#99. If, however, the success of a politician is to be measured by the degree in which he is able personally to influence the course of politics, and attach to himself a school of political thought, then Mr. Mill, in the best meaning of the words, has succeeded.
Millicent Fawcett
#100. The only substance that goes in and never leaves, are words
Natasha Tsakos
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