Quotes About Words

I don't think that three minutes of music on a commercial record is going to bring paradise, but I feel like there is power in music and power in our words and power in what we put out into the world.

I even dream about writing. I'm talking seeing words across the page, whole paragraphs.

There's a certain arrogance to an actor who will look at a script and feel like, because the words are simple, maybe they can paraphrase it and make it better.

During a training session, Ibra made a mess of five consecutive passes and no-one told him anything. When I made a mess of one, he shouted at me. We had an exchange of words. After training, he came to apologise, and told me it was the first time in his life that he'd been wrong.

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

Watch your thoughts for they become words.  Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become habits.  Watch your habits for they become your character.  And watch your character for it becomes your destiny.  What we think we become.

What we think and say about God is still both important and unavoidable, for our words help us come to terms with the hallowed mystery and respond to it. However, this approach diligently maintains a conceptual distance between ourselves and God, one which approaches the divine mystery as something to be transformed by rather than solved.

The desire to say nothing, to create sacred space, opens up the most beautiful type of language available – the language of parables, prose and poetry. This is why the mystics would write so extensively about how nothing can be written and would preach beautiful sermons about the futility of words. Without such well-honed words we may begin to think that we have something to say instead of viewing our life as the space out of which God speaks.

The teacher here is the one who says, "You will do greater things than I." This teacher stays only for a season so that the words, which act as bridge to truth, do not become a blockage to it, and so that their iconic presence does not morph into an idolatrous one. Thus, we can say that a total and complete fidelity to our teacher, an unthinking devotion to her words, will always end up being nothing but a betrayal.

For instance, the words love your neighbor should not be thought of as sacred or divine. These words are no more than words. They take on a revelatory role only when they are lived, that is, when someone actually gets their hands dirty and loves their neighbor—in other words, when this phrase is incarnated in action. The idea of loving one's neighbor is the Word of God, not when it is merely affirmed, but when it is lived.

Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.

Everyone who draws breath "takes the lead" many times a day. We lead with actions that range from a smile to a frown; with words that range from blessing to curse; with decisions that range from faithful to fearful….

A person can destroy me with two words. It can just be the way they say them, the inflection.

You can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language .

Deeds are stronger than words, and children are not biblical scholars. As long as they see girls and women treated as inferior by their faith, that's what they will learn, no matter what their holy book says.

Never resolve with violence what can be addressed with cutting commentary.

There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me," to alter the last phrase to "but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.

If you don't say anything it can't become important, but if you say it everyone's ever after got to walk round it like a pile of rocks in the living room.

There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.

It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.

At this unique distance from isolation it becomes still more difficult to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind.

How weightless words are when nothing will do.

And when the future hinges on the next words that are said, Don't let logic interfere, believe your heart instead.