Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

Language is the dress of thought.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is ‚elephant‘.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

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

I don’t like allegories.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

It’s a rather rude gesture, but at least it’s clear what you mean.

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

Help others and give something back. I guarantee you will discover that while public service improves the lives and the world around you, its greatest reward is the enrichment and new meaning it will bring your own life.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.

A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

Words are powerful; if you change your words, you can change your life.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.