Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve. William Wordsworth
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
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Samuel Beckett
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
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George Steiner
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.
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Unknown
More Quotes By William Wordsworth
With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
Habit rules the unreflecting herd.
Books! tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! on my life, There's more of wisdom in it.
Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be...
The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest– Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast.
