Quotes About Meaning

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

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.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

It's only words... unless they're true.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

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.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

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.

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.

I want my words to survive translation.

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

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.

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.