quotations about words
Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
VOLTAIRE
Dialogue
Talking always gets in the way of a good honest conversation.
GREG VOVOS
The Blogger
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
GEORGE ORWELL
The Lion and the Unicorn
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
Words are naught but wind, and the fairest promises like dreams that take flight with the morning.
ÉDOUARD RENÉ DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The Olive Tree
And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.
ANTHONY BURGESS
Enderby Outside
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
TOM ROBBINS
interview, Reality Sandwich
I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy.
PABLO NERUDA
"So That You Will Hear Me"
Our words are such powerful tools, tools that shape divine ideas into reality.
BARBARA WALSH
"Choosing our words wisely for encouragement", Deming Headlight, January 28, 2016
Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"After Long Silence"
You wait for nothing
if not for the word
that will burst from the deep
like a fruit among branches.
CESARE PAVESE
"Earth and Death"
I like good strong words that mean something.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together; and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
Wicked words are the prelude to wicked deeds.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Pamela
Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
letter to Kirill Nabokov, c. 1930
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
EUGENE IONESCO
Fragments of a Journal