Quotes & Sayings About Using Our Words

A work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used' ... 'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it ... When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to 'receive' significant words is always, in one sense, to 'use' them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal. — C.S. Lewis

How do we meditate silently? Just by not talking, just by not using outer words, we are not doing silent meditation. Silent meditation is totally different. When we start meditating in silence, right from the beginning we feel the bottom of a sea within us and without. The life of activity movement and restlessness is on the surface, but deep below, underneath our human life, there is poise and silence. So, either we shall imagine this sea of silence within us or we shall feel that we are nothing but a sea of poise itself. — Sri Chinmoy

Professor Ramachandran believes this synesthetic connection between our hearing and seeing senses was an important first step towards the creation of words in early humans. According to this theory, our ancestors would have begun to talk by using sounds that evoked the object they wanted to describe. For example, words referring to something small often involve making a synesthetic small i sound with the lips and a narrowing of the vocal tracts: Little, teeny, petite, whereas the opposite is true of words denoting something large or enormous. If the theory is right, then language emerged from the vast array of synesthetic connections in the human brain. — Daniel Tammet

So our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love. — Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Judgment and disrespect is an absolute put off..
It crashes the entire person in my mind!!
We don't speak, our words do..
Words can mean a world in a given circumstance..
So depends on the person using them..his thoughts, understanding and intent to 'assign' a disrespectful meaning !!
Speaks volumes of the person!! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

Many of us have to spell words such as "out," "cookie," and "bath" when conversing with other people, lest we unnecessarily excite our pets. And even then they often understand. I've actually had clients who resorted to using a second language around their dogs, but after a while their perceptive pooches caught on. Who says dogs don't understand us? — Warren Eckstein

At birth we begin to discover that shapes, sounds, lights, and textures have meaning. Long before we learn to talk, sounds and images form the world we live in. All our lives, that world is more immediate than words and difficult to articulate. Photography, reflecting those images with uncanny accuracy, evokes their associations and our instant conviction. The art of the photographer lies in using those connotations, as a poet uses the connotations of words and a musician the tonal connotations of sounds. — Nancy Newhall

Kim called me a slut under her breath in H&P, and Mr. Wallace heard her and gave a lecture on the negative effects of labels, and how words like that serve to limit women's sexual expression, and how there's a whole history of words that basically mean slut8 and yet there are no equivalent epithets for men whatsoever, and didn't that say something about how women are viewed in our culture? He said a more accurate term could be: "a girl who's using sexuality in an attempt to gain approval from the opposite sex ... ." Or, if you look at it a different way, "a liberated, open girl who likes boys and feels comfortable expressing affection, but is misunderstood." Blah blah blah.
I'm sure he meant well, but I wanted to call Kim a megaslut right back and not think about it anymore — E. Lockhart

All our words from loose using have lost their edge. — Ernest Hemingway,

The symbolic evidence of women's invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even in language. Women are subsumed, excised, erased by male pronouns, by male terminology, by male prayers about brotherhood and brethren, even and always by exclusively male images of God. The tradition that will call God spirit, rock, key door, wind, and bird will never ever call God mother. So much for the creative womb of God; so much for "I am who am." So much for "Let us make human beings in our own image, male and female, let us make them." What kind of spirituality is that? To take the position that using two pronouns for the human race is not important in a culture that has thirty words for car, multiple words for flowers, and dozens of words for dog breeds is to say that women are not important. — Joan D. Chittister

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed. — Joshua Reynolds

Most of us live in a Jackal world where we take turns using the other person as a waste basket for our words. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

You see, King, we have a legend - I used to believe that it was all fairy-tale rubbish and empty smoke. It is a legend about how such things as war and death and despair were common in our country at one time. These terrible words, which we have long since stopped using in our language, can be read in collections of our old tales, and they sound awful to us and even a little ridiculous. Today I've learned that these tales are all true ... But now tell me, don't you have in your soul a sort of intimation that you're not doing the right thing? Don't you have a yearning for bright, serene gods, for sensible and cheerful leaders and mentors? Don't you ever dream in your sleep about another, more beautiful life where nobody is envious of others, where reason and order prevails, where people treat other people only with cheerfulness and considerations? — Hermann Hesse

We plowed through Chaucer, and I learned to assist her using the Middle English dictionary. One year we spent the winter painstakingly noting each instance of symbolism within Pilgrim's Progress on separate recipe cards, and I was delighted to see our pile grow to be thicker than the book itself. She set her hair in curlers while listening to records of Carl Sandburg's poems over and over, and instructed me on how to hear the words differently each time. After discovering Susan Sontag, she explained to me that even meaning itself is a constructed concept, and I learned how to nod and pretend to understand. My — Hope Jahren

We have to restore the meaning of the word 'love.' We have been using it in a careless way. When we say, 'I love hamburgers,' we are not talking about love. We are talking about our appetite, our desire for hamburgers. We should not dramatize our speech and misuse words like that. We make words like 'love' sick that way. We have to make an effort to heal our language by using words carefully. the word 'love' is a beautiful word. We have to restore its meaning (31). — Thich Nhat Hanh

Hiding behind the mask of a quotation, using someone else's words to bolster our own softly blooming emotions. — Vicki Pettersson

As parents, we can do a great deal to further this goal by helping our children develop alternative ways of knowing the world verbally/analytically and visually/spatially. During the crucial early years, parents can help to shape a child's life in such a way that words do not completely mask other kinds of reality. My most urgent suggestions to parents are concerned with the use of words, or rather, not using words. — Betty Edwards

I don't mind people trying to pick apart my policies, and that's fine and that's fair game. But, you know, I don't think we're serving our nation well by allowing the discourse to become so uncivil that people use words that they shouldn't be using. — George W. Bush

First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I'm inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind. — Malcolm X

The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives. — Cherrie Moraga

What did Jonathan Edwards mean in sending word to his wife that their union was "uncommon"? Was it that? And how was a union that had issued in eleven offspring "spiritual"? Of one thing we may be sure: Jonathan Edwards was not using his last words carelessly. This "major artist and chief American philosopher" (Miller, 1949:225) had not yet discarded his palette. His message to her had - all his words had - an exact, uncoded meaning, Lockean in its empirical force, that is there for us to recover if we will attend. Our path is to discover if we can the substance of this "uncommon" and "spiritual" union that was at the same time unquestionably an erotic bond. Something greater than curiosity is at stake for us here. Jonathan Edwards is preeminently a theologian of the heart and of the affections; to discover the kind of love that was central between these two may provide an exact clue to his own theological ethics - a bonus not to be disdained. — James William McClendon Jr.

It is so awkward that how our ancestors wasted their whole life and never thought about education or making difference for the future generations. My Grandfather lived more than a 100+ years, married 3 women and as he was illiterate he just wasted 115 fucking years. I wish I could live a hundred years like him to make difference, so the next generation does not use the same insulting words I am using today. — M.F. Moonzajer

Unknowingly we make our emotional states worse by using and relating high-intensity negative words to our experiences in life. You can use empowering/positive words to change how you think, which will then change your feelings, decisions and results. — Maddy Malhotra

hardest time: our voice will not be our own. The crusader's voice is the voice of the crowd and must rise louder all the time, for there is, of course, the other side to be drowned out. Worse, the voices of most crowds sound alike. Worse still, the voice that seeks to do other than communicate when it makes a noise has something brutal about it; it is no longer using words as words but as something to brandish, with which to threaten, brag or condemn. — Eudora Welty

Although music appeals simply to the emotions, and represents no definite images in itself, we are justified in using any language which may serve to convey to others our musical expressions. Words will often pave the way for the more subtle operations of music, and unlock the treasures which sound alone can rifle, and hence the eternal popularity of song. — Hugh Reginald Haweis

Nobody Beats Us! served as our main trigger ... We practiced using trigger words, private verbal keys, which unlocked certain thoughts for us. We had a half-dozen phrases-some dealt with maintaining our technique, two dealt with maintaining our technique, two dealt with our stroke rating. The most powerful phrase was 'Nobody Beats Us!' According to our plan, when I said these words to Paul toward the end of the race, we would immediately shift into our final sprint, rowing as high and hard as possible, straight through, until we crossed the finish line. — Brad Alan Lewis

As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story. — Sharon Shinn

Some people are just weak and vulnerable but not dangerous. By using our heart we can more easily choose the right words when communicating with them. — Robin Sacredfire

One of the difficulties of thinking clearly about anything is that it is almost impossible not to form our ideas in words which have some previous association for us; with the result that our thought is already shaped along certain lines before we have begun to follow it out. Again, a word may have various meanings, and our use of it in one sense may deceive our readers (or even ourselves) into supposing that we were using it in some other sense. — A.A. Milne

Words, like anything else used too often, soon depreciate in value, lose their edge, and cease to bite into our lives. When phrases, such as unconditional love, trip too easily off the tongue, the speaker's ego may experience a temporary rush of exhilaration using an in salvation slogan, but his heart remains unchanged. — Brennan Manning

What is said determines who listens and who understands. Graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances - accents, punctuation and so on - that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to. I'm interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are. — Tibor Kalman

English, although the official language of Nigeria, was a formal language with which strangers and non-relatives addressed you. It had the potency of digging craters between you and your friends or relatives if one of you switched to using it. So, our parents hardly spoke English, except in moments like this, when the words were intended to pull the ground from beneath our feet. — Chigozie Obioma

The thoughtless habit of using the words "existence" and "exist" as designations for being is one more indication of our estrangement both from being and from a radical, forceful, and definite exegesis of being. — Martin Heidegger

Most immigrants agree that at some point, we become permanent foreigners, belonging neither here nor there. Many tomes have been written trying to describe this feeling of floating between worlds but never fully landing. Artists, using every known medium from words to film to Popsicle sticks, have attempted to encapsulate the struggle of trying to hang on to the solid ground of our mother culture and realizing that we are merely in a pond balancing on a lily pad with a big kid about to belly-flop right in. If and when we fall into this pond, will we be singularly American or will we hyphenate? Can we hold on to anything or does our past just end up at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be discovered by future generations? — Firoozeh Dumas

When it comes to words, rather than using our own voice, authentic and unpracticed, we steal someone else's to shield our fear. — Terry Tempest Williams

Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feeling using a minimum of words-I think of Emily Dickinson -to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today. — Therese Anne Fowler

We put our thoughts, knowledge and ideas into what we write. We fill it with our passions, sometimes creating new businesses, new jobs, new organisations that work to make the world better than the one we already have. We write to discover and share what we think, what we feel, and what we know. We write to discover gems of ideas that nudge the world a little. Sometimes we start seismic revolutions, using words to form nations or write laws that embody our principles. We hold people to account and we inspire them. We connect. — Susan Feehan