quotations about words
Word -- that invisible dagger.
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
Words are mere sound and smoke, dimming the heavenly light.
GOETHE
Faust
Words are powerful, especially when they become actions.
PETE WILSON
"Words are powerful, especially when they become actions", Brazil Times, March 5, 2017
Words are sometimes signs of ideas; sometimes of the want of them.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
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
Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.
ROBERT ALTMAN
Esquire, March 2004
Words have not the color of the rose
Nor the beauty of the morn!
EDWIN CURRAN
"The Depths of Love"
Words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
MAYA ANGELOU
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Jargon of Authenticity
Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.
DAN SIMMONS
Olympos
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
WILLIAM H. GASS
A Temple of Texts
Written, spoken or read I've always been amazed how one or two words could encourage someone to keep going. Or a devastating sentence could painfully break a person's heart. Even a simple written phrase could change someone's life forever.
HEIDI ALLEN
"Words Are Powerful -- My Journey With Words", Huffington Post, March 14, 2017
You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
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
As the bud a leaf, so at last the thought becomes a word.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
By words the mind is winged.
ARISTOPHANES
The Birds
First words are critical. Just ask any novelist or screenplay writer.
RICK BROWN
"The first words you need to hear", Your Houston News, January 13, 2016
Flaubert's famous search for the "mot juste" was not a search for words that glow alone, but for words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.
STANLEY FISH
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One