naming things Quotes

Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it...Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it?...For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'

What is originality? To see something that is as yet without a name, that is as yet impossible to designate, even though it staresus in the face. The way it usually is with people, it is a thing's name that makes it perceptible to them in the first place.--For the most part, the original ones have also been the name-givers.

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

Some changes of language are to be regretted, as they lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things.

The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.

I kind of have a Victorian sensibility - I don't understand stuff until I can classify it and name it.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

There is nothing namable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.

We humans have had from time unknown the compulsion to name things and thus to be able to deal with them. The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it. And in ancient thought the name itself has power, so that to know someone's name is to have a certain power over him. And in some societies, as you know, there was a public name and a real or secret name, which would not be revealed to others.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.