quotations about words
Words are so last year.
BEANO
Twitter post, March 31, 2017
You must assume that your words are going to be repeated, misunderstood, or exaggerated by the person you "shared" with.
DREXEL GILBERT
"The top 5 words you should never say at work", New York Daily News, March 5, 2017
The words we speak have such power, and we have the power to choose them wisely.
BARBARA WALSH
"Choosing our words wisely for encouragement", Deming Headlight, January 28, 2016
Words come in many varieties. They show actions and feelings; they demonstrate obtuse or abstract ideas or they express concrete notions. Often we divide words into simple words, everyday language, and complicated or complex words, and words that should express subtleties. Often we use words not to be clear but to obfuscate our intentions and hide our real meanings. These are the words that at first sound wonderful but upon examining, we come to realize that they are veils hiding truth and vehicles of confusion.
PETER TARLOW
"What words can really mean in life", The Eagle, February 6, 2016
I believe words have power. Words can build up your self-esteem or words can puff up your pride. Words can deceive you into wrong thinking or words can guide you to safety. Words can move you to compassion. Words can even heal. Your own words can defeat you since our mental self-talk is the software directing our life.
RON WOOD
"Words are weapons", Meridian Star, January 23, 2016
He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
By words the mind is winged.
ARISTOPHANES
The Birds
Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,
Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
Behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined. Actually, every word has a great burden of memories, not only just of one person but of all mankind. Take a word such as bread, or war; take a word such as chair, or bed or Heaven. Behind every word is a whole world. I'm afraid that most people use words as something to throw away without sensing the burden that lies in a word.
HEINRICH BÖLL
The Paris Review, spring 1983
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
WILLIAM H. GASS
A Temple of Texts
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
Words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Words which enlighten some darken others.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Words are but the shining garments of Thought.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
DEPECHE MODE
"Enjoy the Silence"
Words carried weight, some more than others, and it seemed to him that once you'd arranged them into phrases they stayed that way like bricks you'd laid in a wall and went on meaning what they said no matter what happened.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
A word in earnest is as good as a speech.
CHARLES DICKENS
Bleak House