Blaise Pascal Quotes

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.

Language is powerful. Words matter.

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

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

I believe words mean something. I really do.

We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

There was no "me" in Alchemy. Well, phonetically there was, but that wasn't the point.

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

How long a time lies in one little word?

How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.

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.

Problems are messages.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word.

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

Whoever came up first with that saying a picture is worth a thousand words didn't understand the first thing about either one.

Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term.