Top 82 Words Have No Meaning 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. Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#3. 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
#4. the ultimate meaning of words cannot be found in what the listener hears but in what he listens to upon hearing
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#5. 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
#6. When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.
Akshay Vasu
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Experience is beyond knowledge, words and speech.
It is experience which shows us the real meaning of life.
Gian Kumar
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Words cannot only be made ... But made to have a meaning, free the tongue and continue your speech.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#17. When you truly know the meaning of the word love, you will also know the meaning of the word pain.
Javan
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Wisdom is not in words; Wisdom is meaning within words.
Khalil Gibran
#22. Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.
Benjamin Franklin
#23. 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
#24. Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning ...
Fay Weldon
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. God is not all that interested in your grammar. He is interested in the meaning of your grammar!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The pieces of my sister's body. I stood there, letting the meaning of those words sink in.
Otsuichi
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. In nearly all ballads, the words set the mood and meaning, while the music intensifies or enhances them.
Kate Smith
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. People don't follow words; they follow conviction and without conviction the words are meaningless.
Jennifer Ott
#45. Better than a meaningless story of a thousand words is a single word of deep meaning which, when heard, produces peace.
Gautama Buddha
#46. 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
#47. The greatest thing about writing is that you get to shape more than one life.
Katja Michael
#48. Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.
Richard Feynman
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. English is a beautiful language, a remarkably precise language with a million words to choose from to deliver your exact shade of meaning.
Laura Fraser
#52. Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.
Yang Wanli
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
Edmund Morgan
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Perhaps, then, the words male and female have no general meaning.
Richard Dawkins
#62. Silence is not absence of words. Silence is the space where words arise and dissolve. Without silence, words have no meaning
Rashmit Kalra
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".
Antonin Scalia
#67. 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
#68. Without context words and actions have no meaning at all
Gregory Bateson
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. YES and NO is just a word but it have big meanings inside it.
Adel Sakura
#80. 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
#81. We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#82. 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
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