quotations about words
How charming it is that there are words and sounds: are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things eternally separated?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Investigations
Twas a special gift of God that speech was given to mankind; for through the Word, and not by force, wisdom governs.
MARTIN LUTHER
"Of God's Word", Table Talk
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
A man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
A Place To Come To
Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Words Fail Me", BBC Radio, April 29, 1937
What happens to a country when a leader's words are worthless, when their promises are toothless or utterly useless?
BRIAN STELTER
"CNN Drops The Hammer On Trump And Tells America That The President's Words Are Worthless", PoliticusUSA, March 26, 2017
You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
Fair words never hurt the tongue.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
Eastward Ho
The same words
come from each mouth
differently.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Fifteen Pebbles"
Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me in like a coffin.
JOHN GARDNER
Grendel
For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus
I write because words are beautiful when used correctly to describe thoughts and feelings. I write because when a topic or thought is important, the words just pour right onto the page as if that is where they were supposed to be.
SAM WAKITSCH
"I write because to me, words are beautiful", Chicago Now, January 25, 2016
I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.
TAD WILLIAMS
Otherland: City of Golden Shadow
Everyday your words are revealing what is in your heart. Think of it as "Soulchat."
DAN DELZELL
"Your Words Reveal Your Heart", Christian Post, April 1, 2017
Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
If our words are kept under control, it shows that we have a lot of other things where they should be.
R. D. HOTTLE
"Anchor On ... Great Words of Life", Highland County Press, April 1, 2017