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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
Sep 16, 2025
There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.
I was wondering why I was put in prison for working in an African language when I had not been put in prison for working in English. So really, in prison I started thinking more seriously about the relation between language and power.
Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below
God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.
Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
Language is power, in ways more literal than most people think. When we speak, we exercise the power of language to transform reality. Why don't more of us realize the connection between language and power?
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
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