Martin Heidegger Quotes

Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

… words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize

Why and how are words so important that they cannot be too often used.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

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.

Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things.

All tongue, without either head or heart.’

Trump has words, but there's not really any depth there.

Sometimes I say working on a story in a writers' room is like saying the same word over and over and over again until it doesn't make sense anymore. Like, you say it until you don't know what you're saying.

My mother, with a Master's in English Literature, taught me to appreciate language and that words matter.

I believe words mean something. I really do.

Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.

To-morrow it seemLike the empty words of a dreamRemembered on waking.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

Christian witness is concrete: words without actions are empty.

what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.

'What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them?' 'No use to them,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' 'I can't say,' the Gnat replied.