Top 56 Quotes About Words And Their Meanings
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful.
Simon Mawer
#7. Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained.
Olivia Sudjic
#8. You know sometimes words have two meanings.
Robert Plant
#9. In every cell in every body in every living thing, strings of words make sentences, meanings locked together
Johnny Rich
#10. I love the idea that a name might change based on who you are at a given moment in time.
Lia
Jodi Picoult
#11. 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
#12. I know you lawyers can with ease, Twist words and meanings as you please; That language, by your skill made pliant, Will bend to favour every client; That 'tis the fee directs the sense, To make out either side's pretense.
John Gay
#13. 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
#14. I wish I didn't need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#15. The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us.
S.I. Hayakawa
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Where will the meanings be
when the words are forgotten
will I see again
where you are
W.S. Merwin
#19. Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#20. A versifier arranges words and rhymes into verses; a poet arranges verses and rhymes into meanings.
Dejan Stojanovic
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. You never feel more aware of what it means to be alive than when you're falling in love. Or dying.
Kate Bassett
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
Terry Pratchett
#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. Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.
Sanford Meisner
#31. I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus.
Julie Taymor
#32. Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.
Blaise Pascal
#33. Words cannot only be made ... But made to have a meaning, free the tongue and continue your speech.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#34. (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
#36. When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#37. Silence is a great companion when words are devoid of meanings.
Nema Al-Araby
#38. The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.
Markus Zusak
#39. Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings ... but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Robert A. Heinlein
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. It's really funny, because if you make up words, then people project their own meanings onto it, which I find interesting.
Aphex Twin
#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. It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
Haruki Murakami
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Not all meanings are meant to be clear at once. Some ideas take time. Some words are designed to lead us on inner journeys, with truth hidden deep inside them.
Brian Froud
#52. In the old tongue which had once been his world's lingua franca, most words, like khef and ka, had many meanings. The word char, however - char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo - had only one. Char meant death.
Stephen King
#53. 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
#54. We shape our lives around words, words whose meanings are always changing.
Marty Rubin
#55. ...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
#56. English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that intrudes into our intellectual environment.
Willard Gaylin
