Quotes About Words

Echo of your thoughts has greater impact on the world than your actions.

I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all.

It is madness to think that knowing a language and reading a few books can create allegiances between people. Thoughts, books, ideas, words – if anything, they make you more alone, because they destroy whatever instinctive loyalties you may once have possessed.

This is my gift to you, this story that is also a song, these words that are a part of Fokir. Such flaws as there are in my rendition of it I do not regret, for perhaps they will prevent me from fading from sight, as a good translator should. For once, I shall be glad if my imperfections render me visible.

I find myself subject to the entire range of emotions and reactions that a great book will call forth from its reader. I chuckle, laugh out loud, smile wistfully, cringe, widen my eyes in surprise, and even feel sadness--all from the neatly ordered rows of words and their explanations. All of the human emotions and experiences are right here in this dictionary, just as they would be in any fine work of literature. They just happen to be alphabetized.

Along with tableity (the condition of being a table) and paneity (the state of being bread), cellarhood is a wonderful example of the spectacular ways English has of describing things that no ever thinks it necessary to describe.

Anglo-Saxon tends not to lend itself to long and elaborate words that have strung together three or four affixes to create a rhetorical term for a very obscure thing. While

All of the human emotions and experiences are right there in this dictionary, just as they would be in any fine work of literature. They just happen to be alphabetized.

Apricity (n.) the warmth of the sun in winter. A strange a lovely word. The OED does not give any citation for its use except for Henry Cockeram's 1623 "English Dictionarie". Not to be confused with "apricate" (to bask in the sun), although both come from the Latin "apricus", meaning exposed to the sun.

The Verbalist, 1894

The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words.

We need precise words for Jesus. Otherwise, Christian theology is built on a foundation of sand.

In fact, Joe Biden repeatedly reached out with words of kindness. That's a quality in politics that is vastly underestimated.

She taught him that sometimes, when someone was in emotional denial, they needed proof of how wrong they really were. Sometimes they needed actions instead of words. Sometimes they needed someone to make the hard decision or to say the painful thing, or they would be lost and locked in their own hearts forever.

Un giorno ti dirò che ti amo, Jimmy. Avrai solo una possibilità quando accadrà, perchè avere quelle parole sospese, con niente a prenderle e nessuno a ripeterle, è il peggior silenzio del mondo

The reason we need words to define our hearts is that our hearts are lonely, vulnerable, bare and beating things, and sometimes, they do not always know truth unless they hear it.

Oh, damn the words he once threw like dandelions to the wind. Now when he needed them, they were buried under bandages and broken teeth.

Carrefour" O You, Who came upon me once Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing, Why did you not strangle me before speaking Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words And then leave me to the mercy Of the forest bees. Originally published in Coterie: A Quarterly: Art, Prose, and Poetry No. 4. Edited by Lall Chaman (1920)

Sometimes the most appropriate response to an attack is to not engage, especially in situations where your own words may be used as weapons against you.

Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.

Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.

perfect pitch is much more common among people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and several other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch.

With practice, you began to recognize entire words by themselves. C-A-T became simply cat, thanks to a mental representation that encoded the pattern of the letters in that word and associated that pattern with both the sound of the word and the idea of a small, furry animal that meows and often doesn't get along well with dogs. Along