Meanings Of Words quotes:

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It is nonetheless the best usage that decides the meaning of words. -- Wilson Follett
The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education. -- Antisthenes
The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us. -- S. I. Hayakawa
How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words! -- Samuel Adams
Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness. -- Katherine Mansfield
Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform. -- bell hooks
In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words. -- Mason Cooley
How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences) -- Edmond Jabes
If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature. -- Steven Weinberg
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. -- Philip K. Dick
How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond. -- Joyce Carol Oates
Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like. -- Joseph Sobran
For it was not so much that by means of words I came to a complete understanding of things, as that from things I somehow had an experience which enabled me to follow the meaning of words. -- Plutarch
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. -- Guy Debord
The world of public discourse - political, social, diplomatic, commercial - has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of their veracity. Language has been turned on its head. -- Deena Metzger
What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself. -- Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words. -- Constance Hale
In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other. -- Paul Auster
The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things... Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of man. -- Thucydides
For there have risen many who have given to the plain words of Holy Writ some arbitrary interpretation of their own, instead of its true and only sense, and this in defiance of the clear meaning of words. Heresy lies in the sense assigned, not in the word written; the guilt is that of the expositor, not of the text. -- Hilary of Poitiers
Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified. -- Roland Barthes
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
One writes to find words' meanings. -- Joy Williams
Words take on many different meanings. -- Erin McKean
You know sometimes words have two meanings. -- Robert Plant
Words are like bodies; meanings are like souls. -- Moses ibn Ezra
The language of friendship is not words but meanings. -- Henry David Thoreau
Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them. -- Blaise Pascal
Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words. -- Christian Nestell Bovee
Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. -- Blaise Pascal
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity. -- Evelyn Waugh
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The Constitution is a 200-year-old parchment, simply because we digitize the words should not suggest their meanings change. -- Ed Markey
If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist. -- John Dewey
Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them. -- Jasper Fforde
The fish trap exists because of the fish: once you have gotten the meanings, you can forget the words. -- Zhuangzi
I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus. -- Julie Taymor
Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning. -- Sanford Meisner
It's really funny, because if you make up words, then people project their own meanings onto it, which I find interesting. -- Aphex Twin
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. -- George Orwell
So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with. -- John Locke
It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words. -- Haruki Murakami
When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words. -- Owen Barfield
Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels. -- Willard Van Orman Quine
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two. -- Marcel Proust
Words have very potent meanings and people read them and they react to them personally. They are very suggestive in terms of your life and things like that. -- Robert Barry
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings. -- W. E. B. Du Bois
We singers have a different level of responsibility from other musicians. We have words that we must convey; we have meanings that we must convey through these lyrics. -- Jessye Norman
That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. -- T. S. Eliot
When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur. -- Pattiann Rogers

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