Words With Meaning Quotes & Sayings

It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real. — Madeleine L'Engle

English is a beautiful language, a remarkably precise language with a million words to choose from to deliver your exact shade of meaning. — Laura Fraser

Texts like the Bible and the works of the holy elders were written under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit. The person who studies them partakes of this Divine Grace in a mystical way. The soul is nourished with Grace even if the person who reads such literature does not understand the meaning of what is being read. "Just by reading this material," he claimed, "the individual becomes spiritually empowered by the Grace embedded in the words themselves. — Kyriacos C. Markides

One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food - lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt this before. — M.L. Rio

Every day the words that Keep-on-Dancin' and the Gypsy imparted to me - theories, observations, advice and warnings - are substantiated and acquire deeper meaning.

'It's not for nothing there are so many bistrots in Paris,' Keep-on-Dancin' asserted. 'The reason so many people are always crowded into them isn't so much they go there to drink but to meet up, congregate, come together, comfort each other. Yes, comfort each other: people are bored the whole time, and they're scared, scared of loneliness and boredom. And they all carry around in their heart of hearts their own pet little arch-fear: fear of death, no matter how devil-may-care they might appear to be. They'd do anything to avoid thinking about it. Don't forget, it's with that fear all temples and churches were built. So in cities like this, where forty different races mingle together, everyone can always find something to say to each other. — Jacques Yonnet

Young earth creationists try to force modern science into a literal reading of Genesis 1. Day-age theorists try to fit Genesis 1 into modern science. Proponents of the restoration view try to have their cake and eat it too by inserting a speculative gap between verses 1 and 2 of this chapter. All three views are fundamentally misguided and are rooted in contradictory opinions about the meaning and significance of various words and phrases in Genesis 1 (e.g., "day," "formless void"). None of them have seriously considered the more fundamental question concerning the kind of literature we are dealing with in Genesis 1. More — Gregory A. Boyd

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter ... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. — John Ruskin

Do you ever wonder what happens to the words that we send
Do they bend, do they break from the flight that they take
And come back together again with a whole new meaning
In a brand new sense, completely unrelated to the one I sent
((Did You Get My Message?)) — Jason Mraz

Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours. And we can draw close to one another in times of need, and live to comfort each other.

And sometimes when the black depths are silent, we can do even more. We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us. Out of sounds, words and other frail and worthless things, we can construct playthings--songs and poems full of meaning, consolation and goodness, more beautiful and enduring than the grim sport of fortune and destiny. — Hermann Hesse

There are two types of codes, ciphers, and true codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation. — Samuel R. Delany

Be proud of your child, accept him as he is and do not heed the words and stares of those who know no better. This child has a meaning for you and for all children. You will find a joy you cannot now suspect in fulfilling his life for and with him. — Pearl S. Buck

And I realise the only way to tell the others
is through the way my voice can take these broken words
and turn it into music.
Turn it into poetry.
And I sing to make myself come alive,
but also for you,
because I'd like this to mean something.
To not disappear with the dark I will enter one day
and so now I will tell.
If not for you, then for my own heart,
because it tells me to,
and I'm learning to listen. — Charlotte Eriksson

Abortion is the Antichrist's demonic parody of the eucharist. That's why it uses the same holy words, "This is my body," with the blasphemous opposite meaning. — Peter Kreeft

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. — Walter Pater

She attended the French performance, but the play's content now had a connection to her life. She read a book and the book invariably had lines with sparks from her mind, the fire of her emotions flickered here and there, and words spoken the night before were written down, as if the author had overheard how her heart beat.
The forest held the same trees, but their sound had taken on special meaning; she had established a vibrant consonance with them. The birds did not simply twitter and chirp but were saying something to each other. Everything around her spoke and responded to her mood; a flower would blossom and she seemed to hear its breathing.
pp. 256-257 — Ivan Goncharov

Each of these men illustrates the true meaning of worship. They feared the Lord and maintained their rightful position before Him in their hearts. They were so devoted to the Lord that their worship continued even in extremely difficult circumstances. Those who simply "draw near with their words" and whose reverence for Him "consists of tradition learned by rote" (Isaiah 29:13) have no understanding of real worship. Although they may experience a certain vague sense of His presence as they sing hymns and choruses, their revelation of Him will be extremely superficial. — Steve Gallagher

Why? Don't you know why you love me?"
"I know that I'm happiest at your side," I said fervently. "I know that when we're apart, my heart is with you, when we disagree I still want you near. It's like I was made for you, amira, but I don't know why."
"Kashmir . . ." She laughed a little in disbelief. "That's . . . that's what love looks like."
"But is it only a trick of Navigation?" I asked, nearly pleading. "And if so, what is truly mine?"
"I am."
Her words took me by surprise. She said it so simply - so quiet, so true. Only two words, three letters, one breath, but never had a promise held more meaning. She turned to me then, and in her eyes, I saw not oblivion, but infinity, and the stars were not as bright as her smile. — Heidi Heilig

And now a word from our sponsors. Or not now, but later. Much later. You won't know when it happens. It'll be just one of many words you'll encounter that day. But it will come leaden with unseen meaning and consequence, and it will slowly spread throughout your life, invisibly infecting every light moment with its heaviness. Our sponsors cannot be escaped. You will see their word. And you will never know. — Joseph Fink

Like all who are impassioned, I take blissful delight in losing myself, in fully experiencing the thrill of surrender. And so I often write with no desire to think, in an externalized reverie, letting the words cuddle me like a baby in their arms. They form sentences with no meaning, flowing softly like water I can feel, a forgetful stream whose ripples mingle and undefine, becoming other, still other ripples, and still again other. Thus ideas and images, throbbing with expressiveness, pass through me in resounding processions of pale silks on which imagination shimmers like moonlight, dappled and indefinite. — Fernando Pessoa

Every spell is something special, fit for the moment when it's done." Edmund pushed his bowl across to Tom. "It's not just the words you say, but the way they make you feel, the meaning and the rhythm, the connection you make with them. It's not just the things you think, but how the place and time you're in can change them. — Matthew Jobin

Don't put people, or anything else, on pedestals, not even your children. Avoid global labels such as genius or weirdo. Realize those closest get the benefit of the doubt and so do the most beautiful and radiant among us. Know the halo effect causes you to see a nice person as temporarily angry and an angry person as temporarily nice. Know that one good quality, or a memory of several, can keep in your life people who may be doing you more harm than good. Pay attention to the fact that when someone seems nice and upbeat, the words coming out of his or her mouth will change in meaning, and if that same person were depressive, arrogant, or foul in some other way, your perceptions of those same exact words would change along with the person's other features. — David McRaney

I'm not going anywhere, Empress," he said with a wicked smile. "I merely want a better look."
He had lifted her skirts even higher before she fully comprehended the meaning of his words and struggled to sit up. "No..." she said, embarrassed by the very idea that he might want to see such an intimate place.
He reached up, running one hand to the back of her neck and pulling her toward him for a searing kiss. When she had softened against him once more, he released her from the caress and said, "Oh, yes, Empress. — Sarah MacLean

Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me. — Black Elk

In dealing with many words and different cultures every day, I have come to realize that the essence of life can be reduced to the magic of three sentences, in the order of their strength: "I apologize", "I love you", "Hi". The use and the meaning you replenish them with become the mirror of yourself, eventually of an entire humanity. (Soar) — Soar

Most of the words we use in history and everyday speech are like mental depth charges. As they descend [through our consciousness] and detonate, their resonant power is unleashed, showering our understanding with fragments of accumulated meaning and association. — James Axtell

I'm chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people's expectations. I think music is the primary model-how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I'm just trying to get it so it can be like feeling. — Terrance Hayes

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak. — Elfriede Jelinek

Technopoly is to say that its information immune system is inoperable. Technopoly is a form of cultural AIDS, which I here use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome. This is why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words "A study has shown ... " or "Scientists now tell us that ... " More important, it is why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence. Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves. Alfred North Whitehead called such information "inert," but that metaphor is too passive. Information without regulation can be lethal. — Neil Postman

The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything. — Elan Mastai

A co-op woman, old, tired, Jewish, fake drops of jade spread across the little sacks of her bosom, looked up at the pending wind and said one word: "Blustery." Just one word, a word meaning no more than "a period of time characterized by strong winds," but it caught me unaware, it reminded me of how language was once used, its precision and simplicity, its capacity for recall. Not cold, not chilly, blustery ...
"It is blustery, ma'am," I said to the old co-op woman. "I can feel it in my bones." And she smiled at me with whatever facial muscles she still had in reserve. We were communicating with words. — Gary Shteyngart

Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning. — John W. Dawson

Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over ... [they] now mean the establishment point of view ... Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity. — John Pilger

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable. — Edith Grossman

Who is it?" asks Zain, his eyes wide with disbelief at Shayda's unusual outburst. "No-one," she replies. It's a day of simple words, loaded with meaning. The no-one she said yes to a few hours ago. The no-one she agreed to spend the rest of her life with. The no-one whose rosary is dangling from her wrist. I will always be no-one. Because everyone who counts in Shayda's world is on the other side of the door. I will always be on the perimeter of her life, always the outsider, looking in. — Leylah Attar

I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot. — Eugene Ionesco

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.
-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE — Robert Louis Stevenson

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. — Friedrich Nietzsche

And you will never know what a battle
I fought to keep the meaning of my words
Solid with the world we were making. — Ted Hughes

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It's the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language. — Joshua Foer

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably. — Ezra Pound

Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them. — Marcel Proust

Americans should never forget that the founders of this country, like all who have served her in uniform, were willing to die defending everything its flag represents. It's so easy to get lost in the controversies that divide us. But I believe, no matter what our race, religion, or beliefs may be, that Americans should be able to come together to keep our country rooted in what made it great: a land of opportunity, a place where people can make something of themselves, limited only by their imaginations and willingness to work hard; a country where we can all come together, whatever our differences, for the greater good; a country of hands up, not handouts, where we try to live by the meaning of the words "Love thy neighbor," and put as much effort into helping others as we do helping ourselves. By doing those things, we can continue to live up to the idea of "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. — Marcus Luttrell

I will not impress you with words, I will prove to you their definition. It's a genuine vocabulary. — Soar

Sometimes, life seems to have a higher meaning. Events unfold in uncanny sequences. Long-forgotten acquaintances turn up with news that changes lives. A stranger appears and speaks a few words of wisdom, solving a previously insoluble problem, or something in a recent dream transpires in reality. Suddenly the existence of God seems confirmed. — Dean Koontz

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. — Thomas Paine

The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day. — Peter Matthiessen

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding. — Henry Miller

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. There is no limit to His power.
If you choose to say, 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prifex to them the two other words, 'God can.'
It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God. — C.S. Lewis

You don't have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning. — Jonathan Lethem

What are you reading?" Polonius asked.
"Words, words, words," said Hamlet.
"And what's the subject?"
"Lesser than the king, but still not nothing."
It took Polonius a moment to realize he had answered another meaning of 'subject.' "I mean what do you read about?"
"All in a line, back and forth." said Hamlet. "I go from left to right with my mind full, and then must drop it there and head back empty-headed to the left side again, and take up another load to carry forward. It's a most tedious job, and when I'm done, there are all the letters where I found them, unchanged despite my having carried them all into my head. — Orson Scott Card

The public had been forced to see [by Kant's writings] that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make vigorous use of this privilege; Schelling at least equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Step back and scrutinize your work, to delve deep into the meaning behind the words, it will get both easier in some ways and harder in others. Either way, you need to practice everyday. You will probably get faster with time, because you learn to do this instinctively, and the writing may flow better on some days more than others, but it doesn't get easier. And if you aren't writing everyday, you are doing yourself and your craft a disservice. Writing is a habit. Get into the habit. — Darynda Jones

Students who take Latin are more proficient and earn higher scores on the verbal SAT exam. The business world has long recognized the importance of a rich vocabulary and rates it high as evidence of executive potential and success. Understanding the etymological history of a word gives the user vividness, color, punch, and precision. It also seems that the clearer and more numerous our verbal images, the greater our intellectual power. Wheelock's Latin is profuse with the etymological study of English and vocabulary enrichment. Our own experiences have shown that students will not only remember vocabulary words longer and better when they understand their etymologies, but also will use them with a sharper sense of meaning and nuance. — Frederic M. Wheelock

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning. — Maya Angelou

Maybe the answer is: Don't be an asshole, think before you open your trap, take responsibility for your words. Meaning, apologize when you're wrong and correct yourself moving forward - and don't constantly look for reasons to be offended and police well-meaning people's words. We want folks to talk to each other, right? Not just hang out with like-minded people all the time. Everyone is ignorant about something, and everyone is offended by something. If people can't have a calm, respectful dialogue without being hurt by ignorance, or without offending with insensitivity, then what the hell are we supposed to do? Surround ourselves with robots who don't challenge our ideas?" I — Penny Reid

Her grandfather's books [ ... ] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning; every syllable was inexpressively precious — Irene Nemirovsky

... And that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something - or tries to. People need things like that to go on living - mental landscapes that have meaning for then, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That what I think. — Haruki Murakami

Mingling with the remains of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. — Salman Rushdie

The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music ... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words. — Rabindranath Tagore

But most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that happened to be before his eyes.
But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious. — Leo Tolstoy

Words of wisdom, the meaning of life, p e r h a p s even the
answer sought by Borges's librarians - all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little
for us unless we savor them, engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our
lives — Jonathan Haidt

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. But this, at least, I believe with all my heart: In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility. Hyde — Eleanor Roosevelt

The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly - yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person. — Hermann Hesse

True success is not the end of the journey; true success is a journey without an end. So many people relax after achieving something and they forget the undone. They neglect their untapped destiny and they halt their journey of life not reaching their real and true destination. Whilst we have life, we must live life. Whilst we have life, we must give a true meaning to life. Whilst we have life, we must dare to do the undone; though the road is weary; though we may be having a sense of fulfillment, and though we might have done something! Let us awake and pursue with all zeal and tenacity until we get to the real end of our true purpose and destiny, such that long after we are gone, the voice of our footprints will speak to inspire, build and raise a generation of champions ! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I do not mean to say that I viewed those desires of mine that deviated from accepted standards as normal and orthodox; nor do I mean that I labored under the mistaken impression that my friends possessed the same desires. Surprisingly enough, I was so engrossed in tales of romance that I devoted all my elegant dreams to thoughts of love between man and maid, and to marriage, exactly as though I were a young girl who knew nothing of the world. I tossed my love for Omi onto the rubbish heap of neglected riddles, never once searching deeply for its meaning. Now when I write the word love, when I write affection, my meaning is totally different from my understanding of the words at that time. I never even dreamed that such desires as I had felt toward Omi might have a significant connection with the realities of my life. — Yukio Mishima

I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning. — Mike Patton

The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even a man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible). The whole man in fact may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories ... but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his own view on the meaning and purpose of life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity. — E.F. Schumacher

The sinner runs when no one is pursuing him
Meaning: one's guilt will always haunt or live with him — Ikechukwu Joseph

If we accept that there is no such thing as 'zero risk' then we should not spin the meaning of words with assertions such as 'all accidents are preventable'. — Rob Long

There is an intelligence factor that works with the spoken word. With words, you have to understand meaning and nuances and things like that. You have to be able to relate ... but with music it's just music. — Tommy Chong

The word 'Terror' is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning. — Jim Corbett

A word drops into the mist
like a child's ball into high grass
where it remains seductively
flashing and glinting until
the gold bursts are revealed to be
simply field buttercups.
Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me. — Louise Gluck

We tend to manage our lives intellectually - in other words, we get stuck in our heads, keeping ourselves preoccupied with juggling an assortment of activities and responsibilities in order to manage the surface of life. Meanwhile, underneath we feel empty, hungry for meaning, restless, somewhat lost, and frequently ungrounded - as if we aren't really inhabiting our own bodies. This is why we keep ourselves so busy. It's one way to distract ourselves, at least temporarily, from experiencing the low-grade inner anxiety that haunts us. Change — Sonia Choquette

Words are words. People add meaning to words.
Information is information. With words people add value to information.
Words breathe life into information. Words move mountains of information.
Words are action. Momentum for living evolves from pursuit of deeper, wider and higher significance, utility and value of words.
Words we sow, nourish and harvest feed hungry minds and hearts. Gathered words strengthen, ignite and release us.
Words identify, signify and proclaim our individuality. Words pronounce a purposeful life's choices.
With wisdom, courage and patience we must choose high-performing words for long-term relationships. Chosen words become soul mates. — John R. Dallas Jr.

But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try - Ransom has tried a hundred times - to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. — C.S. Lewis

Miss Brobity's Being, young man, was deeply imbued with homage to Mind. She revered Mind, when launched, or, as I say, precipitated, on an extensive knowledge of the world. When I made my proposal, she did me the honour to be so overshadowed with a species of Awe, as to be able to articulate only the two words, "O Thou!" meaning myself. Her limpid blue eyes were fixed upon me, her semi-transparent hands were clasped together, pallor overspread her aquiline features, and, though encouraged to proceed, she never did proceed a word further. I disposed of the parallel establishment by private contract, and we became as nearly one as could be expected under the circumstances. But she never could, and she never did, find a phrase satisfactory to her perhaps-too-favourable estimate of my intellect. To the very last (feeble action of liver), she addressed me in the same unfinished terms. — Charles Dickens

Lacan wrote about two levels of speaking, one in which we know what we are saying (even when struggling with something difficult or contradictory) and another in which we have no idea of what we are saying. In this second level of speaking there are repeating words, phrases, and even sounds that function as magnets of unconscious meaning, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas. He called such markers in speech 'signifiers. — Annie Rogers

Natural polytheism embraces the science of ecology as a basic metaphor for theological inquiry. In other words, natural polytheism seeks to understand our relationship with the gods as an aspect of interrelated systems of being, consciousness and meaning. Its focus is, first and foremost, on the wildernesses that defy our carefully mapped boundary lines, that penetrate even the most civilized cultural centers and underlie our most cherished notions of what it means to be human." - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Natural Theology: Polytheism Beyond the Pale — John Halstead

With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times
simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. Only the words her mother used were more literal, enriching the tired phrase with meaning: "He is made from your meat and bone." It had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Love that defied trite words or even description, that carried with it tenderness and passion and laughter and friendship. Love that made her eyes sparkle and her breath stop when she saw him and imbued life with more meaning and more purpose. — Karen Ranney

The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial. — Robin Marantz Henig

And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin. — Marya Hornbacher

If there is no continuity what is there? There is nothing. One is afraid to be nothing. Nothing means not a thing - nothing put together by thought, nothing put together by memory, remembrances, nothing that you can put into words and then measure. There is most certainly, definitely, an area where the past doesn't cast a shadow, where time, the past or the future or the present, has no meaning. We have always tried to measure with words something that we don't know. What we do not know we try to understand and give it words and make it into a continuous noise. And so we clog our brain which is already clogged with past vents, experiences, knowledge. We think knowledge is psychologically of great importance, but it is not. You can't ascend through knowledge; there must be an end to knowledge for the new to be. New is a word for something which has never been before. And that area cannot be understood or grasped by words or symbols: it is there beyond all remembrances. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease. — Susan Sontag

Clarity! Accuracy! Think of your words as a key to fit into the lock of your meaning. Cast them with precision. That key should then be swift and perfect in achieving its aim. Well shaped talk is a release from the indefinite. It is explanation. Preparation. Nothing more. — Jane Borodale

The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,
words with little meaning, actions with little worth,
one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. — Thomas Carlyle

Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. he must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition. — Ernest Becker

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them. — George Orwell

To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language. — Aleister Crowley

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words
"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"
words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way? — Jennifer Egan

Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt. — Graham Greene

Thus once more I found confirmed on all sides the simple, clear, important, and practical meaning of the words of Jesus. Once more, in place of an obscure sentence, I had found a clear, precise, important, and practical rule: To make no distinction between compatriots and foreigners, and to abstain from all the results of such distinction, - from hostility towards foreigners, from wars, from all participation in war, from all preparations for war; to establish with all men, of whatever nationality, the same relations granted to compatriots. All this was so simple and so clear, that I — Leo Tolstoy

The problem with words is that they easily lose their meaning. Say something often enough and it becomes a tic, not an expression of how you actually feel. Not only that, but words rarely change things. Actions do. — Seth Godin

To a lean, healthy shape. But in the case of this magazine, these words have additional meaning. Let me explain. A few months back, Shape joined forces with its sister title Fitness , creating what we consider the biggest, boldest, most — Anonymous

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning. — Paul Provenza

When someone can fill such words with the depth of meaning that they are intended to have, it's like hearing them for the first time. — Orville Schell

I guess I'm attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive. — Andrew Bird

I am a 'professional word seller'..I sell 'WORDS' for a 'living'...
'LIVING' with 'empowering' words is a 'Choice' we make..
'CHOICE' comes via the meaning we give to words we use..
'MEANING' comes from understanding 'life'... — Abha Maryada Banerjee

One day, while he was idly reciting his verses to a captive audience, a scrap of paper, borne by the wind, landed on his lap. On it were written two words: "Layla" and "Majnun." As the crowd watched, Majnun tore the paper in half. The half on which was written "Layla" he crumpled into a ball and threw over his shoulder; the half with his own name he kept for himself.
"What does this mean?" someone asked.
"Do you not realize that one name is better than two?" Majnun replied. "If only you knew the reality of love, you would see that when you scratch a lover, you find his beloved."
"But why throw away Layla's name and not your own?" asked another.
Majnun glowered at the man. "The name is a shell and nothing more. It is what the shell hides that counts. I am the shell and Layla is the pearl; I am the veil and she is the face beneath it."
The crowd, though they knew not the meaning of his words, were amazed by the sweetness of his tongue. — Reza Aslan

I therefore used the last ten minutes of our classes to recite with them words from the Bible and verses from hymns, so that they would know them and the words would stay with them throughout their lives. The aim of my teaching was to bring to their hearts and thoughts the great truths of the Gospels so religion would have meaning in their lives and give them the strength to resist the irreligious forces that might assail them. I also tried to awaken in them a love for the Church, and a desire for that hour of spiritual peace to be found in the Sunday service. I taught them to respect traditional doctrines, but at the same time to hold fast to the saying of Paul that where the spirit of Christ is, there is freedom. — Albert Schweitzer