Charles Baudelaire Quotes

This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

...words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.

I grew up in church, so every time I say certain words, I'm like, 'I'm going to get in trouble.'

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

Language usage always has a political context.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.

If we were handling a bomb which could go off at any minute as a result of our actions, we would mind ourselves and be delicate. Our words have the same power, yet we wield them around as though they were powerless and insignificant.

I know, if I'm speaking to God in any kind of way, I keep myself from using profanity.

We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.

The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.

God used words to create this planet, so be careful with them.

The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

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

To practice magic is to bear the responsibility for having a vision.

Society matters not so much. Words are everything.

I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.

In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.

Be careful with words, they're dangerous. Be wary of them. They begat either demons or angels. It's up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing is as dangerous as giving free rein to words

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

For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.

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 are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.