Word Meanings Quotes

#1. Word meanings are like stretchy pullovers, whose outline contour is visible, but whose detailed shape varies with use.

Jean Aitchison

#2. The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

G.K. Chesterton

#3. Personally, I'd like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it's going to be so overloaded with meanings it's just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.

Hal Duncan

#4. We would be a few years younger,if every day we meditated for five minutes on the meanings of the word innocence.

Alexandra Vasiliu

#5. For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.

Philip Kitcher

#6. The word good has many meanings ...

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#7. Well, "slithy" means "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.

Lewis Carroll

#8. I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

Anne Stevenson

#9. 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

#10. I say 'art' advisedly, for art is undefined, undefinable, and without limits. I can use the word without fear of misusing it, for it has no exact meaning. There are as many meanings as there are artists.

Robert A. Heinlein

#11. Happiness! There is no word with more meanings, each person understands it in his own way.

Fernan Caballero

#12. YES and NO is just a word but it have big meanings inside it.

Adel Sakura

#13. 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

#14. Talent is so loaded a word, so full to the brim with meanings, that an artist might be wise to forget about it altogether and just keep on working.

Eric Maisel

#15. Tonight
A friendly breeze
Will agitate roots of meanings.
Wonder will flap its wings.

Deep in the night, an insect
Will gnaw
At the green portion of solitude.
Morning will fall
Into the word of morning.

Sohrab Sepehri

#16. I have become intrigued with the combining of seemingly unrelated ideas or images, or the drawing upon the many, sometimes dissimilar, meanings a word might have.

John Barton

#17. 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

#18. There were the years - years of childhood and innocence - when I had believed that carminative meant - well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life - a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.

Aldous Huxley

#19. Inner healing involves moving from darkness to the light. "Light" is a word that has different meanings yet is generally understood as love and understanding. Love nurtures the emotional body; understanding fills the voids created by pain.

Deepak Chopra

#20. I love the idea that a name might change based on who you are at a given moment in time.
Lia

Jodi Picoult

#21. Perhaps like the many and various meanings of the word "we," liberals use the word "unsubstantiated" to mean "tested repeatedly and proved true."

Ann Coulter

#22. 'Natural' is a word that has become unmoored by its meanings. If you go into a vitamin shop, things are natural, and people look at that, and they think it's good. It's no different than any other thing you swallow.

Michael Specter

#23. 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

#24. The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

George Santayana

#25. Reality' is a word with many meanings.

Peter Brook

#26. 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

#27. It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

Lewis Mumford

#28. That was the problem ... with trusting to the written word ... We were human, mortal and fallible. We forgot, we made errors, argued ambiguities, and twisted meanings to suit our own ends.
And in doing so, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves.

Jacqueline Carey

#29. The word Gospel is from the Anglo-Saxon godspell, meaning "good news." Ultimately the word comes from the Greek euangelion, also meaning "good news." Gospel can mean the good news preached by Jesus, or the good news preached about Jesus. These two meanings are the ones found in the Bible.

Anonymous

#30. 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

#31. There is so much information in one Hebrew word that translators are hard pressed to decide how much information should be cut. Since the first official translation (the Septuagint), Jewish translators advocated translating Hebrew (for outsiders) at the 'story' level.
pg viii

Michael Ben Zehabe

#32. The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.

Rene Dubos

#33. Jealousy is a word with too many meanings. It's a TARDIS of a word, bigger on the inside, a small, mean thing on the surface, but a complicated dance of emotions and negotiations within. I'm suffering with every single meaning of the word jealous.

Sierra Simone

#34. So what you're saying [...] is that the translator has a lot of decisions to make. That there are multiple meanings to be found in any word, in any sentence. In any situation.

Stephanie Perkins

#35. When we say that Philosophy tries to clear up the meanings of concepts we do not mean that it is simply concerned to substitute some long phrase for some familiar word.

Charles D. Broad

#36. I almost try to explain another untranslatable word--sunyata--to Jonas. The idea has Buddhist roots and several meanings, depending on context. I think emptiness is the closest word, but, in English, we infer emptiness as a void, a lack. Sunyata is open with possibility, a meditative space.

Emery Lord

#37. The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.

Jeanette Winterson