Meaningless Meaningful Words/Quotes

"The key words in this kind of writing are "death", "life", "birth", "sun", "moon", "womb", "cosmic" and "catastrophe", and by free use of them the most banal statement can be made to sound picturesque, while what is outright meaningless can be given an air of mystery and profundity. Even the title of this book, 'The Cosmological Eye', doesn't actually mean anything, but it sounds as though it ought to mean something."

—George Orwell, review of The Cosmological Eye by Henry Miller

"When philosophers use a word -- "knowledge", "being", "object", "I", "proposition", "name" — and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? — What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations