The world I'm interested in is the one where things are not named.
— Martha Graham
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
— Elvis Costello
The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.
— P.W. Bridgeman
It is never wholly possible for me to mean what I say or say what I mean, because the fact of my using signs, words, always leaves my meaning dispersed, divided, and never quite at one with itself.
— Terry Eagleton
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.
— Anonymous
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
— Herbert Spencer
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind.
— Anonymous
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
— Benjamin Whorf
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
— E. B. White's 17th Rule in “The Elements of Style”
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.
— E. B. White, "The Elements of Style"
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
— Henry B. Adams
Words divide us, actions unite us.
— slogan of the Tupamaros
Words, like glasses, obscure everything which they do not make clear.
— Joseph Joubert
The voice has meaning independently of what it says.
— Roland Bathes
Words mean exactly what I want them to mean.
— Lewis Carroll
I cannot love a friend whose love is words.
— Sophocles