Corita Kent Quotes

I believe words mean something. I really do.

If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning.

I find it difficult to believe that words have no meaning in themselves, hard as I try. Habits of a lifetime are not lightly thrown aside.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

What I value in books is lucidity. I want the language to be rich; I love lexical fireworks on the page, but I have to know what it means. I want to be surprised and delighted, not merely baffled.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

This is a much more fitting interpretation of the book than its modern interpretation.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

And so with all things: names were vital and important.

Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry.

Originalism says that when you consult the text, you give it the meaning it had when it was adopted, not some later modern meaning.

This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis... only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.

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.

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.

If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning.

It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.

Unfaithful to their meanings, words perturb our perturb our powers of reason ... the only safe words are our words.

Every Constitution embodies the principles of its framers. It is a transcript of their minds. If its meaning in any place is open to doubt, or if words are used which seem to have no fixed signification, we cannot err if we turn to the framers; and their authority increases in proportion to the evidence which they left on the question.

Man’s writing has but one true sense, which is that which the Author meant when he writ it.

Intention and construction of words shall be taken according to the vulgar and usual sense

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

Latin is beautiful and has become something of an international language, but there is also something about singing in your native language that has meaning.

The other day, I was taking part in an audience Q&A when I was roundly scolded by a woman for 'allowing the BBC to ruin the English language.' Naturally I felt terrible, as I had no idea either that it was happening or that I was responsible.

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.