quotations about words
Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation and Empire
Words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
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
I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Harper's Magazine, November 2010
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
As the bud a leaf, so at last the thought becomes a word.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
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
There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.
THOMAS REID
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
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
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
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!
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
There are times when people aren't able to acknowledge or interpret an action but words are definite.
ANGIE JURGENS
"The power of words, through the eyes of a writer", Journal Star, January 30, 2016
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
Words are so last year.
BEANO
Twitter post, March 31, 2017
A good word costs as little as a bad one, and is worth more.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
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
Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion