Karl Jaspers Quotes

Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

When a tongue fails to send forth appropriate shafts, there might be a word to act as healer of these.

If it requires great tact to speak to the purpose, it requires no less to know when to be silent.

The problem with words is that they easily lose their meaning. Say something often enough and it becomes a tic, not an expression of how you actually feel. Not only that, but words rarely change things. Actions do.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use.

Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

And even if she says no, and really means yes, then quite frankly she's playing games and isn't worth the price of dinner.

I only mean forty per cent of what I say.

How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)

If you want to be a leader, it doesn't mean that you have to have an opinion on everything. But if you do have an opinion and it is clear and you feel strongly about it, then you should say it.

What I like is having a conversation that gets you on the right page. And, if that means having conversations in lieu of rehearsal - I don't wanna get up and cook the thing before we shoot it but I do wanna know that me and the director know exactly what we both want to achieve, and that we're moving in the same direction.

To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.

Meaning doesn't lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren't love - the money, the car, the house, the prestige - we are loving things that can't love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing. ("A Return to Love")

Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound, Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.

Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you.

Good thoughts not delivered mean squat.