We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

Usually when he forgot words he would wait for them to seep back into consciousness like fish drawn up to the hungry surface of a stream. He would remember the initial letter of the forgotten word or sense sounds in it; soon the word reappeared in an illumination.

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

It's when the thing itself is missing that you have to supply the word.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.