quotations about words
A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.
STEFAN ZWEIG
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Confusion of Feelings or Confusion
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
letter, April 9, 1945
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm
DEPECHE MODE
"Enjoy the Silence"
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to J. H. Tiffany, March 31, 1819
Words are naught but wind, and the fairest promises like dreams that take flight with the morning.
ÉDOUARD RENÉ DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
A word in season is most precious.
AESOP
"The Swan and the Goose", Aesop's Fables
A definition is nothing else but an explication of the meaning of a word, by words whose meaning is already known. Hence it is evident that every word cannot be defined; for the definition must consist of words; and there could be no definition, if there were not words previously understood without definition.
THOMAS REID
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Philosophy
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
What a children's earliest words are also depends on the age at which they start talking -- a late talker who is already mobile will learn words for the toys and objects that they find around them, while early talkers may learn more conversational words, for example hello, bye bye, or thank you.
ELENA LIEVEN & CAROLINE ROWLAND
"Should children understand at least 25 words by the time they are 2-years-old?", The Independent, January 14, 2016
The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
The Art of Writing
Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Cave
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of reach of common understanding--symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.
EDWARD HIRSCH
How to Read a Poem
Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.
JOHNNY CARSON
The Tonight Show
Into the cities my people had gathered. They had become dizzy with words. Words had choked them. They could not breathe.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Cornfields", Mid-American Chants
Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"After Long Silence"
The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Principles of Success in Literature