Quotes about Words

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words

Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.

We need to love people with our deeds AND our words because sharing the Good News is a process, not just an event.

Now the soul says, 'Lord, where shall I go? You have the words of eternal life.' [John 6: 68] Here he centers, here he settles. It is the entrance of heaven to him; he sees his interest in God.

Reading is a gift, but only if the words are taken into the soul--eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight.

All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.

There is no living the life of faith, whether by prophet or person, without some kind of sustaining vision like this. At some deep level we need to be convinced, and in some way or other we need periodic reminders, that no words are mere words. In particular, God's words are not mere words. They are promises that lead to fulfillments. God performs what he announces. God does what he says.

Priest and wise man and prophet alike felt that their professional well-being was threatened by Jeremiah's singularity. Panicked, they plotted his disgrace. Their "law" and "counsel" and "words" were in danger of being exposed as pious frauds by Jeremiah's honest and passionate life.

God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for. And that is how we come to identify as apostles of the gospel the men and women and, yes, children, who use words and images and sounds and textures to wake us up to beauty latent and implicit all around us.

Even though innocent, anything I say incriminates me; blameless as I am, my defense just makes me sound worse.

Teaching resurrects dead words so they live again.

It's your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.