Motivational Quotes

Words

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

- Adams, Henry Brooks

Best Quotes about Words

Political correctness is simply a speed bump in the traffic of truth, free thought and speech.

I find it difficult to believe that words have no meaning in themselves, hard as I try. Habits of a lifetime are not lightly thrown aside.

Chase, Stuart

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Hemingway, Ernest

Like an arrow to its mark flies the word good man's word.

Platen

Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs.

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.

Stalin, Joseph

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

I've been asked to say a couple of words about my husband, Fang. How about short and cheap?

Diller, Phyllis

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why --but the editorialists forget it --terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.

Berger, John

10.

I have never been hurt by what I have not said.

Coolidge, Calvin

11.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Cather, Willa

12.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

13.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

14.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

16.

What do you call a boomerang that doesn't work? A stick!

Kirchenbaum

17.

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.

Reid, Thomas

18.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

Card, Orson Scott

19.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Adams, Henry Brooks

20.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

Haldane, John B. S.

21.

Our great men have written words of wisdom to be used when hardship must be faced. Life obliges us with hardship so the words of wisdom shouldn't go to waste.

L'Chiam

22.

We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

23.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

Ellison, Ralph

24.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.

Idle, Eric

25.

The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

26.

On a single winged word hath hung the destiny of nations.

Phillips, Wendell

27.

I don't give a damn for man that can spell a word only one way.

Twain, Mark

28.

For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.

Eliot, T. S.

29.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words... the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Twain, Mark

30.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called weasel words. When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a weasel word after another there is nothing left of the other.

Roosevelt, Theodore

31.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

Connolly, Cyril

32.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.

Proverb, Chinese

33.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

34.

Words represent your intellect. The sound, gesture and movement represent your feelings.

Fripp, Patricia

35.

Keep your words sweet -- you may have to eat them. I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Grellet, Stephan

36.

When I look at you, the wheels of time stand still vs. Your face could stop a clock

37.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

39.

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

Lehman, David

40.

Why do social workers use five-syllable words when dealing with juvenile delinquents?

41.

Gentle words, quiet words, are after all the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more compelling, more prevailing.

Gladden, W.

42.

A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.

Arendt, Hannah

44.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbors, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

Butler, Samuel

45.

Nothing can throw thee into the infernal abyss so much as this detested word -- heed well! -- this mine and thine.

Silesius, Angelus

46.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Lao-Tzu

48.

Each group of words is processed by the brain as a single thought. And because the words are viewed in context, you retain them more accurately than if you processed the words individually.

Saperstein, Rose

49.

The written word can be erased -- not so with the spoken word.

50.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Waugh, Evelyn