quotations about words
Words are but the shining garments of Thought.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
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
All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
The words of God are deeds.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
Words frequently surrender power to the opposer.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Words have not the color of the rose
Nor the beauty of the morn!
EDWIN CURRAN
"The Depths of Love"
Words can only hurt you if you try to read them. Don't play their game!
BEN STILLER
Zoolander
A good word costs as little as a bad one, and is worth more.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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 are the part of silence that can be spoken.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Words once sequenced into phrases were never done with but recycled themselves in perpetuity.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
WILLIAM H. GASS
A Temple of Texts
I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room--a complete mess--so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977