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

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens.

It’s a very good question, very direct, and I’m not going to answer it.

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

Silence speaks so much louder than screaming tantrums. Never give anyone an excuse to say that you’re crazy.

I’m the most recognized and loved man that ever lived cuz there weren’t no satellites when Jesus and Moses were around, so people far away in the villages didn’t know about them.

A saint is tolerant and is attentive to the pleadings of other human beings, not only to spoken messages but to unspoken messages as well.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

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

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

Beauty without expression is boring.

I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there’s a good English phrase for it – cold war.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

We live in an image society. Speeches are not what anybody cares about; what they care about is the picture.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

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.

Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

People are very reluctant to talk about their private lives but then you go to the internet and they’re much more open.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Both times I was in India, I could not get people to listen to each other. I had to literally tell people to listen to each other and tell them that they can’t get creative and find alternate solutions if they don’t listen to each other. There’s a lot of arguing and justifying.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don’t think the press has understood me.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

I love singing. I love it, and it doesn’t feel like a chore. It’s an expression.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you’re getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

When I tell a child something the first time, I’m nice. The 15th time, I start to get aggravated.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

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.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.