Rene Daumal Quotes

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

Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

Something's that written out is okay, but it's not always a clear indication of what a person means.

They place great stress on the clarity of our language for expressing nuances and showing subtleties.

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

I was born into a profession in which my love of words, chosen with care for their meaning and nuance, was extremely important, not only to me, but also to the people with whom I worked with.

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, so they use them with care, with thought, with delight.

Tone is everything.

I know words sometimes have consequences, but I try to choose the correct words every time.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

I mean, what is music anyway? It's a form of communication - at least for me it is. And that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.

A word after a word after a word is power.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

Tone has the living soul.