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

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.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

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.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

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.

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

A letter does not blush.

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

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.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

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.

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

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

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

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

Language is the dress of thought.

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

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

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

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

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.

Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

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.

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

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

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.

You can stroke people with words.

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

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

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

Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

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

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

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.

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

A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

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