Quotes about words

If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain.

There is a weird power in a spoken word... And a word carries far — very far — deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

The last word is not said, — probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word — the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be shaken, I suppose — at least, not by us who know so many truths about either. My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions — and safe — and profitable — and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone — and as short-lived, alas!

"Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled."

Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the most unpredictable in their consequences.

When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. ... Theology works in one culture alone. If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne's culture, where words such as "incarnation" and "trinity" have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision.

I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively. … For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don't lie to yourself and use the wrong words.

Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again.

From the same it proceedeth, that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

[N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.