A Quote by Leopold Sedar Senghor

I have always taken care to put an idea or emotion behind my words. I have made it a habit to be suspicious of the mere music of words.

Leopold Sedar Senghor

Quote Topics

Always Behind Care Emotion Habit Idea Made Made It Mere Music Put Suspicious Taken Words

Quote Author

Leopold Sedar Senghor
Senegalese - Politician
October 9, 1906 - December 20, 2001

I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.

Eugene Ionesco

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Oscar Wilde

I have this theory that the more important and intimate the emotion, the fewer words are required to express it. For instance in dating: 'Will you go out with me?' Six words. 'I really care for you.' Five words. 'You matter to me' Four words. 'I love you.' Three words. 'Marry me.' Two words. Well, what's left? What's the one most important and intimate word you can ever say to somebody? 'Goodbye...'

J. Michael Straczynski

Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

Amos Oz

One listens to a piece of great music, say, and feels deeply moved by it, and wants to put this feeling into words, but it can't be put into words. That's what - the music has already supplied the meaning, and words will just be superfluous after that. But it's that kind of verbal meaning that can't be verbalized that I try to get at in poetry.

John Ashbery

What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.

Robert E. Howard

The words we use don't matter as much as the emotion behind the words. When we understand this, we have the ability to influence, inspire, persuade and affect others.

Darren Hardy

I try to find out what there is in the character that in a way, you can't put into words. If I could put it into words, then it wouldn't be a performance. And if I do put it into words, as I play it, I start to get boxed in by those words.

Alan Alda

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

Jorge Luis Borges

If you have words and want to write music for them, the words hit you with a feeling which you can't really describe in words, and so what you do is to put music to them and in this way you make contact with the words, through the musical thing. It happens when two feelings come together and they do something together and they compliment each other.

Jim Capaldi

It used to be a common saying of Myson's that men ought not to seek for things in words, but for words in things; for that things are not made on account of words but that words are put together for the sake of things.

Diogenes Laertius

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Hugh Reginald Haweis

We battle on in words, as always, mere words, and what's the cure? We cannot find a thing.

Homer

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

John Trudell

Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language.