Knut Hamsun Quotes

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.

Words can be turned into spears. They can be turned into prayers. It's a strange world that you are in. But you deal with words.

But words are more powerful than anything.

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

You can change your world by changing your words... Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Words outlive people, institutions, civilizations. Words spur images, associations, memories, inspirations and synapse pulsations. Words send off physical resonations of thought into the nethersphere. Words hurt, soothe, inspire, demean, demand, incite, pacify, teach, romance, pervert, unite, divide. Words be powerful.

I believe words mean something. I really do.

Language is powerful. Words matter.

The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

Words, for all they were flimsy and invisible, had great strength. They could be fortified as a castle wall and sharp as a foil. They could bite, slap, shock, wound. But unlike deeds, words couldn't really help you. No promise ever rescued a person; it was the carrying-through of it that brought about salvation.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Words matter. Especially ones with four letters.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them both put together.

Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

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.

I am convinced that words are things, and we simply don't have the machinery to measure what they are. I believe that words are tangible things.

Among a man's many good possessions, A good command of speech has no equal. Prosperity and ruin issue from the power of the tongue. Therefore, guard yourself against thoughtless speech.

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

... and the very folds of the curtains contained secrets and sighs.

Was it really so far-fetched to think that words had a way of shaping a person's whole life?

The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us.