Top 100 The Meaning Of Words Quotes
#1. 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
#2. the ultimate meaning of words cannot be found in what the listener hears but in what he listens to upon hearing
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Experience is beyond knowledge, words and speech.
It is experience which shows us the real meaning of life.
Gian Kumar
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. When you truly know the meaning of the word love, you will also know the meaning of the word pain.
Javan
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. God is not all that interested in your grammar. He is interested in the meaning of your grammar!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The pieces of my sister's body. I stood there, letting the meaning of those words sink in.
Otsuichi
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.
Sanford Meisner
#42. Nobody will ever be able to understand the meaning of the measure of his own words.
Sorin Cerin
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Love, I've come to understand is more than three words mumbled before bedtime.
Nicholas Sparks
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
Vaclav Havel
#52. 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
#53. Marrakesh is translated from the words Mur N'Akush in the Berber language meaning "Land of God.
Jake Tour
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Everything has an older meaning. All words have their secrets. Spells and gods are buried in the thicket of language.
Shannon Phillips
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning.
Mike Patton
#69. 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
#70. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
Rebecca Solnit
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#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. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. You used words, discarding them meaninglessly, without thinking, whereas I thought they held meaning. I found what you will never see: that my love resides on the other side of words. - Broken Places
Rachel Thompson
#83. 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
#84. '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
#85. Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.
C.S. Lewis
#86. How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!
Samuel Adams
#87. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#88. When someone can fill such words with the depth of meaning that they are intended to have, it's like hearing them for the first time.
Orville Schell
#89. Silence is not absence of words. Silence is the space where words arise and dissolve. Without silence, words have no meaning
Rashmit Kalra
#90. Abortion is the Antichrist's demonic parody of the eucharist. That's why it uses the same holy words, "This is my body," with the blasphemous opposite meaning.
Peter Kreeft
#91. The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.
Robin Marantz Henig
#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. 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
#94. 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
#95. Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.
Lauren Groff
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!
Lewis Carroll
#99. Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
Milan Kundera
#100. Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.
Bell Hooks
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