Quotes About Words

Language is a surpassing, operated by the subject on significations he has laid down, stimulated by the use made of words around him. Language is an act of transcending. Thus, we cannot consider it to simply be a container of thought; we must see in it an instrument of conquest of self through contact with others.

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.

Language functions with respect to thought as the body does with respect to perception...Some words only come forth in us when we have need of them...As an instrument, language is not like a hammer that has a limited number of uses. It is more like a piano, from which one can draw an infinite number of melodies.

History... is the perpetual conversation carried on between all spoken words and all valid actions, each in turn contesting and confirming the other, and each recreating all the others.

The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire "work" is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences.. . .

I just read them for fun." "Dictionaries?" "Yes." "That doesn't sound like fun. That sounds awful." "Awful used to mean 'full of awe.' The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary." He blinked. "See?" She said. "Fun.

But then, there's a thing that's harder to watch than a sword or nitroglycerin. It cuts and it tears—a tongue does!

Remember the dead do not eat actual solid food, any more than the gods do. They eat the spirit of the food. The priests say a picture of food, or words describing food are as tasty and pleasing as the real thing, to a dead person.

I still cannot take those words to them, my lady. It would mean my life.

Language or "the word" tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas.

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

Words are soldiers of fortune Hired by different ideas.

The mere reading of words will not show you or give you the experience of truth.

Hiljadu puta se pokaješ za ono što kažeš, rijetko za ono što pre?utiš.

Vrijeme nije samo proticanje, ve? i prisustvo. Vidljivi trag ne?ije ruke što je davno zapisala neravne redove, prkosi smrti, a rije?i i njihov smisao žive neprekidno, kao izvor koji ne presušuje, kao svjetlo koje se ne gasi.

I love words; it doesn't matter which, it doesn't matter about what. (I am writing down, at random, things that he said one night, while the kasaba slept in the darkness.) Conversation is a link between people, maybe the only one. That's what an old soldier taught me, we were captured together, thrown into a prison together, chained together and bound to the same iron ring on the wall.

Your dervish trade is strange. You sell words, which people buy out of fear or habit. He doesn't want to, or doesn't know how to sell words. He can't even sell silence. Or talent. And he doesn't care about success.

As soon as his soft voice began to flow the night would become less empty. He built a bridge of cobwebs between us, a bridge of words. They fluttered above us in an arch; they rose and dropped, like the waters of the river. He was the source; I was the mouth. A secret was woven between us, and the beautiful madness called conversation worked a miracle: two dead logs that lay side by side suddenly revided, and were not completely separated.

Hiljadu puta se pokajes za ono sto kazes, rijetko za ono sto precutis.

Uvijek me ?udno uljuljkivala ta povorka rije?i o stvarima koje znam. U tom poznatom krugu kojim se kre?em, osje?am se siguran, bez busija kojima prijete ljudi i svijet.

Hiljadu puta se pokaješ za ono što kažeš, rijetko za ono što pre?utiš, znao sam za tu mudrost kad mi nije bila potrebna.

Nisu govorili o svojoj ljubavi, ve? o tu?oj, a to je isto. Ona je govorila evropske ljubavne stihove, on isto?ne, a to je isto. Nikad im tu?e rije?i nisu bile potrebnije, a to je isto, kao da su izmišljali svoje.

Everything around me smelled musty, like when you open an old book and it smells like words.

Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI.