Quotes about names
Baby nology -
Babynology.com explores baby names of all origins you can get plenty of baby names along with meaning and origin. You can even search the meanings of your baby names.
Ben Carson -
Illogical thinkers throw names and slurs around because they have no arguments with which to rebut their opponents. Rational people have to keep hammering their points home.
Mark Shand -
I'd always thought hurricanes were romantic, with pretty feminine names like Celestine.
Confucius - The Analects of Confucius
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
Alberto Caeiro - The Keeper of Sheep
I don’t always feel what I know I should feel.My thought crosses the river I swim very slowlyBecause the suit men made it wear weighs it down.
Vera Nazarian - The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true name? to respond when called.Ever wonder why?.
Alan W. Watts -
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
George Carlin - Brain Droppings
There are women named Faith, Hope, Joy, and Prudence. Why not Despair, Guilt, Rage, and Grief? It seems only right. 'Tom, I'd like you to meet the girl of my dreams, Tragedy.' These days, Trajedi.
Rick Riordan - The Red Pyramid
You know how hard it is to feel like an extreme falcon-headed combat machine when somebody calls you "chicken man"?
Brandon Mull - The Candy Shop War
Could you just call me Pigeon?” he asked the teacher when she read his name.“Does your mother call you Pigeon?”“No.”“Then to me you are Paul.”...“Nathan Sutter,” the teacher read.“My mother never calls me Nathan.”“Is it Nate?”“She calls me Honeylips.
Alan W. Watts -
The menu is not the meal.
Walpola Rahula - What the Buddha Taught: Revised and Expanded Edition with Texts from Suttas and Dhammapada
The question has often been asked; Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? It does not matter what you call it. Buddhism remains what it is whatever label you may put on it. The label is immaterial. Even the label 'Buddhism' which we give to the teachings of the Buddha is of little importance. The name one gives is inessential.... In the same way Truth needs no label: it is neither Buddhist, Christian, Hindu nor Moslem. It is not the monopoly of anybody. Sectarian labels are a hindrance to the i
E.E. Cummings -
I am an i poet.
Neil Gaiman - Coraline
Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.
J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
Coco J. Ginger -
I remember when your name was just another name that rolled without thought off my tongue.Now, I can’t look at your name without an abundance of sentiment attached to each lettter.Your name, which I played with so carelessly, so easily, has somehow become sacred to my lips.A name I won’t throw around lightheartedly or repeat without deep thought.And if ever I speak of you, I use the English language to describe who you were to me. You are nameless, because those letters grouped together in that
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
George Carlin - Brain Droppings
Do you know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. '200 Dead as Number Three Slams Ashore' is not nearly as interesting a headline as 'Charlie kills 200.' Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it.Me, I'm still waitin' for Hurricane Ed. Old Ed wouldn't hurt ya, would he? Sounds kinda friendly. 'Hell no, we ain't evacuatin'. Ed's comin'!
Shaikh Ashraf - Love & Sacrifice
We are born, we get names, we get educated, we get values, we get job and money. But all this is not life, life is love found in friendship, friendship found in love and in love, sacrifice.” Vijay
Nicola Yoon - The Sun Is Also a Star
Names are powerful things.
Maya Angelou -
Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.
Jude Idada - Didi Kanu and the Singing Dwarfs of the North
Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become.
Liesl Shurtliff -
Names are powerful and so is destiny, but a person's will is more powerful than both put together.
Stan Brakhage -
How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "green"?
Catherynne M. Valente - Radiance
Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.
Ben Marcus - Notable American Women
I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
Caleb and Aaron—now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.
Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games
Glimmer, I hear someone call her - ugh, the names the people in District 1 give their children are so ridiculous ...
Bill Maher - The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
New Rule: Don't name your kid after a ballpark. Cubs fans Paul and Teri Fields have named their newborn son Wrigley. Wrigley Fields. A child is supposed to be an independent individual, not a means of touting your own personal hobbies. At least that's what I've always taught my kids, Panama Red and Jacuzzi.
Philip Sidney - A Defence of Poetry
But hereto is replied that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proveth a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie then, when, under the names of John of the Stile, and John of the Nokes, he putteth his case? But that is easily answered: their naming of men is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build any history. Painting men, they cannot leave men nameless. We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give
Emma Joy Crone - Garden Variety Dykes: Lesbian Traditions in Gardening
My grandmother, a dim, stern figure, named her children Lily and Violet, which I guess from seeing a picture of my mother's paved, ugly backyard, was the nearest she came to a garden.
Trenton Lee Stewart - The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma
So what's your team called?" asked Kate, twisting her legs into a pretzel-like configuration, "We're called the Winmates because we're inmates who win." Kate looked back and forth at Reynie and Constance, searching their expression for signs of delight. "You gave yourselves a name?" asked Constance. Now it was Kate's turn to be baffled. "You didn't? How can you have a team without a name?
Simone Elkeles - Rules of Attraction
If my name was Richard, I'd go by Richard or Rich...not Dick. Hell I'd even settle for being called Chard.
Cuthbert Soup - Another Whole Nother Story
Well," Mr. Cheeseman interjected. "Perhaps there's an easy solution to this. Maybe Captain Fabulous has an alter ego.""What's an alter ego?" asked Gerard."It's a superhero's true but secret identity," said Chip. "You know, the way that Superman is really Clark Kent." "Superman is really Clark Kent?""It's pretty obvious," said Penny. "To everyone but you and Lois Lane.""Okay," Gerard conceded. "Captain Fabulous's alter ego will be...Teddy Roosevelt.
Galileo Galilei - Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.
Nel Noddings - Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War
The Great Stone at the center of the Somme memorial has this inscription: “Their name liveth for evermore.” The memorial contains 73,077 names, the names of young men who were robbed of life. Note that we often say that they gave their lives, but of course, this is not true; their lives were taken from them. It is not outrageous to consider the carving of their names and the false promise of “evermore” another act of violence.
Raubin Chaudhary -
We judge us by our names.
Winston S. Churchill -
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.
T.S. Eliot - Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Before a Cat will condescendTo treat you as a trusted friend,Some little token of esteemIs needed, like a dish of cream;And you might now and then supplySome caviare, or Strassburg Pie,Some potted grouse, or salmon paste —He's sure to have his personal taste.(I know a Cat, who makes a habitOf eating nothing else but rabbit,And when he's finished, licks his pawsSo's not to waste the onion sauce.)A Cat's entitled to expectThese evidences of respect.And so in time you reach your aim,And finally cal
Charles de Lint - Dreams Underfoot
A name can't begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that's the magic of names, isn't it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name.
Eliza Granville - Gretel and the Dark
People often lose their names. Names fall into holes or get eaten by wild animals. Sometimes they’re carried away by the wind.
Michael Ventura - Night Time Losing Time
That's what America's all about, man, if it's about anything. You can choose your own name.
Terry Pratchett - I Shall Wear Midnight
Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.
John Kramer - Blythe
It was no accident that one of the first things God asked of Adam was for him to name the animals he saw around him. Why do you suppose God asked man to do that? Because once you have a name, you have the beginning of understanding, and once you have understanding, you lose fear. God didn’t want man to be fearful. He wanted man to be brave.
Richard Brautigan -
Our names were made for us in another century.
Joe Abercrombie - The Heroes
Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.
Alan W. Watts -
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the wor
Kate Morton - The House at Riverton
I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.
Cherie Priest - Maplecroft
Jackson," he mused. "Not a name either one of you was born to."Lizzie answered, "No. But beyond a certain point, names become accessories. We swap them out as needed, for the sake of peace. You understand?""I understand. Though I disagree. Names aren't hats to change a look, or a suit to be swapped at a whim. Words mean things.""Then we must agree to disagree.
Natalie Lloyd - A Snicker of Magic
The way he said her name made my heart cramp. In all my years of word collecting, I've learned this to be a tried and true fact: I can very often tell how much a person loves another person by the way they say their name. I think that's one of the best feelings in the world, when you know your name is safe in another person's mouth. When you know they'll never shout it out like a cuss word, but say it or whisper it like a once-upon-a-time.
Heraclitus - Fragments
Many who have learnedfrom Hesiod the countless namesof gods and monstersnever understandthat night and day are one
Patricia Hamill - Fearless
If you don't know a name, you can't be hurt when they go. I have no friends anymore, all are lost.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio - The Book of Flights
All words are possible, then, all names. They rain down, all these words, they disintegrate into a powdery avalanche. Belched from the volcano's mouth, they spurt in to the sky, then fall again. In the quivering air, like gelatine, the sounds trace their bubble paths. Can you imagine that?
Roselynn Cannes - Fallen
Many confuse things with their names. This is a mistake. A name is only a word and a word will never be the thing itself. And, yet, names – as words – have power, not inherently, but because we give it to them.
Jean-Paul Sartre - The Words
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
FM-2030 -
Conventional names define a person's past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years
Dark Jar Tin Zoo - Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.
She gave me money to buy condoms, and instead I bought a book of baby names. That’s life. That’s love. That’s fiscally irresponsible.
Dean Koontz - Odd Apocalypse
Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world...
Joanne Harris - Runemarks
A named thing is a tamed thing.
Rick Riordan - The Lightning Thief
Young man, names are powerful things. You don’t just go around using them for no reason.
Nathan Harris -
What if my name was Daniel, Lucas, Noah. Lucas Harris, That doesn't sound right. I think I'll stick with Nate.
Rick Riordan - The Lightning Thief
Names have power.
Howard Tayler -
Maxim 16: Your name is in the mouth of others: be sure it has teeth.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
Jessica Valenti - Full Frontal Feminism
What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.
Madeleine L'Engle - Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It's no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.
Benazir Bhutto -
Benazir Bhutto doesn't cease to exist the moment she gets married. I am not giving myself away. I belong to myself and I always shall.
Ben Marcus - Notable American Women
When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.
W. Somerset Maugham - Cakes and Ale
The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.
Geraldine Brooks - Caleb's Crossing
He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got t
Hal Herzog - Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable "Chilean sea bass.
Ben Marcus - Notable American Women
The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.
Gregory Bateson - Mind and Nature
We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities an
Dejan Stojanovic - Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
Names do not write poems nor do they create work.
Ruth Ozeki - A Tale for the Time Being
A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.
Anne Hamilton - God's Poetry: The Identity and Destiny Encoded In Your Name
For the Hebrews, names provided a direct link with the Creator. They understood words as being the creative fire of God, the ‘black fire on white fire’ of His Law. Every utterance and every act of creation through which He revealed Himself was not only word made flesh but fire made f
George MacDonald -
Who can give a man this, his own name?
Julia Glass -
I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.
Lois Lowry - A Summer to Die
It's a funny thing about names, how they become a part of someone.
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.
Jess Row -
Does it, does it—I'm flailing here—does it have a name? What you've
Brenna Yovanoff - The Replacement
You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.
Ursula K. Le Guin - Inner Lands
None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or
Ray Bradbury - The October Country
It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.
Henry de Vere Stacpoole - The Blue Lagoon
When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.
Firoozeh Dumas - Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
Despite a few exceptions, I have found that Americans are now far more willing to learn new names, just as they're far more willing to try new ethnic foods... It's like adding a few new spices to the kitchen pantry.
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Farthest Shore
No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
Kimberly Karalius - Pocket Forest
She squinted at his nametag. Her eyes weren't quite working. "What's your name?" "Stig.""Stick?" she asked, half ready to believe it. He shook his head and pointed his long index finger at the name stitched on his uniform. "S-T-I-G. Stig."Harriet's breath caught. "I can't believe it. I've been looking for you.
Marty Rubin -
Everybody calls me "Marty." I never know what to call myself.
Neil Gaiman - Coraline
No," said the cat. "Now, you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.
Ryan David Jahn - Good Neighbors
He pulls the gun away from his head and sets it on the coffee table. He wonders who first called it a coffee table. He gets to his feet and walks into the hallway. He wonders who first called it a highway. He wonder who first named anything. How did someone look at a dog and decide what to call it? It’s all so random. Everything is so goddamn random.
Marty Rubin -
You can't know people, only their names.
Vera Nazarian - The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true
Samuel R. Delany - Babel-17
An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented . I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room; I am—
Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
What's in a name?
Anthony T. Hincks -
Carlyle! Not just another nameless entity.
Muhammad Yunus -
I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.
Jay-Z -
My mom had early rap records, like Jimmy Spicer. In the middle of the records was a turntable and a receiver - I used to scratch records on it - and on top was a reel-to-reel. In front of that wall were more stacks of records. It was either Mom's record or Pop's record, and they had their names on each and every one.
Vinoba Bhave -
Though the names karma yoga and sannyasa are different, the truth at the heart of both is the same.