John Dorsey Quotes

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

I find it difficult to believe that words have no meaning in themselves, hard as I try. Habits of a lifetime are not lightly thrown aside.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

Words, which are the dress of thoughts, deserve surely more care than clothes, which are only the dress of the person.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

Words are important. They do matter.

Language is powerful. Words matter.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

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