quotations about words
Contrary to what some people have tried to imply, the meaning of a word can be, to a great extent, a subjective experience. After all, words are really just ideas. Those ideas are layered in experiences unique to each individual's perspective. That means that we may not be using our terms in the same exact manner as we might think others are. If that isn't bad enough, those unique ideas might, or might not be rooted in fact. These things should force us to reflect on the thought that perhaps even the few words we do use are not as well defined or universal as some would have us believe.
DAVID BUCIENSKI
"How much do words really matter?", Southgate News Herald, March 9, 2017
By words the mind is winged.
ARISTOPHANES
The Birds
After all is said and done, more is said than done.
AESOP
Aesop's Fables
A word in earnest is as good as a speech.
CHARLES DICKENS
Bleak House
Words once sequenced into phrases were never done with but recycled themselves in perpetuity.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
DEPECHE MODE
"Enjoy the Silence"
Words frequently surrender power to the opposer.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer
Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,
Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
Words are but the bannerets of a great army, a few bits of waving color here and there; thoughts are the main body of the footman that march unseen below.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one's experiences in common.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
When I was a girl my mother said
I chattered like a magpie
even in my sleep, as if I knew one day
the words would all be stopped,
wine corked up in a bottle.
MAGGIE BUTT
"I am the Sphinx"
Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
Though I do keep lists of words that catch my attention for a variety of reasons, they rarely make it into poems, not infrequently because I lose the lists.
WALTER BARGEN
"An Interview with Walter Bargen", BkMk Press
There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.
THOMAS REID
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
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
The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908
The word; the forth-speaking of a thought, an idea, a truth, is the beginning of every new creation, or pulse of creation. It is the inauguration of every new order of things; it begins every new messianic reign, every coming of a better time. The darkness never comprehends it; but always, to as many as receive it, it gives power.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW
Essays and Sermons