#meanings

The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man. ↗

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

#call #example #five #for example #good

People need meanings to everything. People want you to intellectualize every choice you make. ↗

— Juliana Hatfield

#every #everything #make #meanings #need

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings. ↗

— Anne Stevenson

#am #any #art #ask #aware

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. ↗

— Willard Van Orman Quine

#exhibits #labels #languages #meanings #museum

The language of friendship is not words but meanings. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#language #meanings #words

God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality. ↗

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

#limits #lives #meanings #mortality #our

The point is, the political reporters are the ones who no longer understand the ritual they are covering. They keep searching for political meanings in the tepid events when a convention is now essentially a human drama and only that. ↗

— William Greider

#covering #drama #essentially #events #human

Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture. ↗

— David Bohm

#compulsive #conform #constitute #culture #distortion

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little. ↗

— Stephen Spender

#comprehending #formal #little #master #meanings

Unless followed by the world 'education', liberal has now lost this meaning [seeking knowledge or doing something for its own sake -- i.e. 'freely' with no exterior motive]. For that loss, so damanging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank those who made it the name, first of a political, and then a religious, party. The same irresponsible rapacity, the desire to appropriate a word for its 'selling-power', has often done linguistic mischief. It is not easy now to say at all in English what the word conservative would have said if it had not been 'cornered' by politicians. Evangelical, intellectual, rationalist, and temperance have been destroyed in the same way. Sometimes the arrogation is so outrageous that it fails; the Quakers have not killed the word friends. And sometimes so many different people grab at the coveted word for so many different groups or factions that, while it is spoiled for its original purpose, none of the grabbers achieve secure possession. Humanist is an example; it will probably end by being a term of eulogy as vague as gentleman. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#meanings #words #education