Words Have Meaning Quotes

#1. What we say to each other-even when it's anonymous, even when we think no one is paying attention, even when it's online-matters. Words have meaning.

Justine Ezarik

#2. Words have meaning beyond the obvious. Words have consequences beyond intentions. Civil words align risk and reward of such unknowns.

John R. Dallas Jr.

#3. 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

#4. I love when people quote me. It makes me feel that my words have meaning. People give words power. When they speak out for things they feel, we all become alive.

Jennifer Megan Varnadore

#5. Words have meaning, type has spirit.

Paula Scher

#6. Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Antonin Scalia

#7. Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself," he said. "Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe." From a Life Magazine interview in 1988.

Julian Jaynes

#8. Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Octavio Paz

#9. Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words 'to father' have such a different meaning from the words 'to mother'.

Claire Fuller

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Words cannot only be made ... But made to have a meaning, free the tongue and continue your speech.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#13. Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

Benjamin Franklin

#14. Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning ...

Fay Weldon

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Words have weight.

Stephen King

#24. 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

#25. Everything has an older meaning. All words have their secrets. Spells and gods are buried in the thicket of language.

Shannon Phillips

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Perhaps, then, the words male and female have no general meaning.

Richard Dawkins

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Katherine Mansfield

#32. That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.

Tom Wolfe

#33. 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

#34. Silence is not absence of words. Silence is the space where words arise and dissolve. Without silence, words have no meaning

Rashmit Kalra

#35. Much theological discussion is wasted, not because the words used have no possible meaning, but because the people who use them don't mean anything by them.

Rosemary Haughton

#36. How much better to follow a straight course and attain a goal where the words "pleasant" and "honourable" have the same meaning!

Seneca.

#37. 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

#38. I find it difficult to believe that words have no meaning in themselves, hard as I try. Habits of a lifetime are not lightly thrown aside.

Stuart Chase

#39. Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".

Antonin Scalia

#40. We can't change the world by shouting, but our words can have meaning if we give them enough respect.

Evan Meekins

#41. Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy's exact words-why bother to go on living?

Paul Auster

#42. Without context words and actions have no meaning at all

Gregory Bateson

#43. I saw all races, all colors, blue eyed blonds to black skinned Africans in true brotherhood! In unity! Living as one! Worshiping as one! No segregationists, no liberals; they would not have known how to interpret the meaning of those words

Malcolm X

#44. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.

Zhuangzi

#45. Words have life and must be cared for. If they are stolen for ugly uses or careless slang or false promotion work, they need to be brought back to their original meaning - back to their roots.

Corita Kent

#46. And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words ... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

Alan W. Watts

#47. Her eyes widened slightly at the words and she played the last moments of their conservation over in her head. We are in love. He met her gaze, not letting her look away as he spoke. You appear to have missed my meaning. Allow me to repeat myself more plainly. I love you, Alex.

Sarah MacLean

#48. If there were only one meaning for the words, the first interpreter would find it, and all other listeners would have neither the toil of seeking nor the pleasure of finding.

Ephrem The Syrian

#49. My idea as far as comedy goes has always been to push the limits of what's acceptable for a woman to do or say or be. My hero in that would be Lenny Bruce, who teaches us that words have no meaning. It's the intent behind them that is what's important.

Lea DeLaria

#50. Simple words have the complicated meaning.

Deepak Gupta

#51. People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.

Albert Camus

#52. But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

Marcel Proust

#53. I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.

Geoffrey Rush

#54. All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.

Ezra Pound

#55. It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#56. No new truths await discovery; everything has been given already. But it has all been scattered abroad and dispersed, misrepresented by analysis, dulled by routine repetition. The essential words have been prostituted. We must recover the vital meaning of these ideas.

Isha Schwaller De Lubicz

#57. The shape the words end up taking are themselves the meaning of the words, they are retrospectively what we meant to say. There's no way of knowing this until you register it in visible form. But the other side of this is that you do have some idea of where you are going.

Teju Cole

#58. Words won't have meaning until you put your emotions into them.

Pratik Akkawar

#59. The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

Storm Jameson

#60. Most adults have a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, meaning that children must learn 10 to 20 words a day between the ages of eight months and 18 years. And yet the most frequent 100 words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4000 words account for 98% of conversation.

David Miller

#61. Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.

Tom Waits

#62. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Walter Pater

#63. When the bubble of ignorance bursts the self realizes its oneness with the indivisible Self. Words that proceed from the Source of Truth have real meaning. But when men speakthese words as their own, the words become meaningless.

Meher Baba

#64. If you want to get rid of the perceived meaning of curse words, you'll have to get rid of the feelings which bring their use, and that's not going to happen.

Orlando Winters

#65. The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.

Frederick Buechner

#66. When two words are identical, you must not take undue offence or think you have been wronged in terms of choice. Simplicity is a fine patience of meaning.

Nicole Brossard

#67. All that is not thought is pure nothingness; since we can think only thoughts, and all the words we use to speak of things can express only thoughts, to say there is something other than thought is therefore an affirmation which can have no meaning.

Henri Poincare

#68. Always" and "never" are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove that it's not.

Thomas C. Foster

#69. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

Virginia Woolf

#70. Words from the Heart are different then words from the brain, the meaning is totally different but our ears don't hear it, but the future will tell it to us, be positive and have Patience.

Jan Jansen

#71. I don't know what a credit bubble means. I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning.

Eugene Fama

#72. The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.

Robert Pinsky

#73. Though I thought there weren't any words any more, only fucking signifiers. And since texts have no objective univocal meaning, I feel sure that when I call you a bunch of moronic cunts you will be able to decode that sequence of sequential signifiers with the appropriate emancipated subjectivity.

Jonathan Lynn

#74. The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them.

George Eliot

#75. To a lean, healthy shape. But in the case of this magazine, these words have additional meaning. Let me explain. A few months back, Shape joined forces with its sister title Fitness , creating what we consider the biggest, boldest, most

Anonymous

#76. There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

Marcel Duchamp

#77. See yourself as you really are. Listen to what none of your leaders and representatives dares tell you: You are a "little, common man." Understand the double meaning of these words: "little" and "common." Don't run. Have the courage to look at yourself!

Wilhelm Reich

#78. Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether.

Joseph Campbell

#79. Father Abraham, send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame. There is a frightful meaning in those words. May you never have to spell it out by the red light of Jehovah's wrath!

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#80. The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#81. Words have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what back they wash against.

Philippa Gregory

#82. We consider speech to be the result of thought (we have a thought, then select a sentence with which to express it), but thought also results from speech (as we grope, in words, toward meaning, we discover what we think).

George Saunders

#83. Because words have deep meaning, Tweets have power.

Germany Kent

#84. Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.

Lydia M. Child

#85. When you repeat yourself so many times, even if you're speaking the truth, the repetition starts to feel false. Sometimes, you just feel like the words you're speaking, even if they once had meaning, have lost it. And that makes you feel kind of silly.

Paul Dano

#86. There is an intelligence factor that works with the spoken word. With words, you have to understand meaning and nuances and things like that. You have to be able to relate ... but with music it's just music.

Tommy Chong

#87. The belief that words have a meaning of their own account is a relic of primitive word magic, and it is still a part of the air we breathe in nearly every discussion.

Charles Kay Ogden

#88. Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.

Leo Tolstoy

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

Adel Sakura

#90. An artist who makes pictures that look good but express nothing is like a writer whose words sound good but have no meaning.

Gerald Brommer

#91. I hate polite conversation. I hate it when people stand around and go, 'Hi, how are you?' I hate words that don't have any reason or meaning. Also I hate it when people smoke in elevators and closed in places. It's just so rude.

Madonna Ciccone

#92. We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#93. 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

#94. I don't like to treat words and sounds like objects. You have to penetrate deeply into their meaning.

Eyvind Kang

#95. Why do I feel ashamed to use words like democracy and
freedom and brotherhood? They don't have meaning any
more. I have nothing to write about any more. Remember
all that writing I did? I was going to be a great socialist
writer. I can't make sense of a word, a simple word.

Arnold Wesker

#96. I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth.

Mat Johnson

#97. If everyone realized the value of life, the world would be peaceful. The meaning of these words, "Do unto others as you would have them, do unto you," would be understood: It would be practiced.

Ellen J. Barrier

#98. Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

John Dos Passos

#99. Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say:;: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#100. The words are the words. Seriously. Meaning you don't have boo-boo words. You can do boo-boo things. You can have sex, carnage, mayhem, whatever you're looking for. "The Evil Dead" movies, in my opinion, function better in an unrestricted world.

Bruce Campbell