A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote Topics

Condition Contradiction Conversation Dead Interruption Once Thousand Tricks Word

Quote Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German - Novelist
August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832

There's a scripture in the Book of James which says, 'Become a doer of the word and not a hearer only.' A hearer is someone who looks into a mirror, walks away, and quickly forgets what sort of person he is.

Terrence Howard

For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marriage is a psychological condition, not a civil contract and a license. Once a marriage is dead, it is dead, and it begins to stink faster than a dead fish.

Robert A. Heinlein

A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

Bertrand Russell

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

Barry Lopez

It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Bible isn't meant to just inform us, it is meant to transform us. 40 Days in the Word will teach you how to be not just a hearer of the Word, but a doer of the Word!

Rick Warren

Better than chanting a thousand words in a dead language is one soothing word spoken in the vernacular.

Gautama Buddha

Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy; an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity.

Christian Nestell Bovee

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

Henry Adams

Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

Marcel Proust

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. "Once upon a time" is how all the best children's stories begin, and "prostitute" is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let's keep that beginning.

Paulo Coelho

Once I spoke the language of the flowers, Once I understood each word the caterpillar said, Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings, And shared a conversation with the housefly in my bed. Once I heard and answered all the questions of the crickets, And joined the crying of each falling dying flake of snow, Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . . How did it go? How did it go?

Shel Silverstein

Laughter... is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny.