Quotes on Words

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

Our words, actions, and diplomatic efforts should be aimed at trying to achieve pragmatic goals rather than creating rhetorical effect.

Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine.

The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it.

The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

Keep your soul fit to manifest the life of the Son of God. Never live on memories; let the word of God be always living and active in you.

Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that you 'are,' and in order to express it, you have built a little alphabet, and you make your words from it.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it, putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before.

To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.

When a child makes a mistake or fails to accomplish a certain goal, we must avoid any word or action which indicates that we consider him a failure. 'Too bad that didn't work.' 'I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.' We need to separate the deed from the doer.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

Listening is not understanding the words of the question asked, listening is understanding why the question was asked in the first place.

Often, I can scarcely hear any one speaking to me; the tones yes, but not the actual words; yet as soon as any one shouts, it is unbearable. What will come of all this, heaven only knows!

Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn't just mean written words or oral words. It could be semaphore. And burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea - I hate the government, the government is unjust, whatever.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories. It begins, 'In the beginning God created Heaven.' If I had written these words, I wouldn't have written anything else; it's just enough.

That is the one single word that the food industry hates: 'addiction.' They much prefer words like 'crave-ability' and 'allure.'

We looked too long for God and truth through words alone. The fruit for humanity has been rather limited, it seems to me - especially when I observe every day the extraordinary amount of unhappy and angry people in well educated and 'religious' countries.

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.

If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.