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

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

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

A letter does not blush.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it’s to have any meaning in this world – and stop being its apologist.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

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

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

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.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

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

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

Life is our dictionary.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

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

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

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.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

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

I don’t like allegories.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

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

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

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.

The effects of climate change are real and must be acted on.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

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

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

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

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

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

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.