Motivational Quotes

Words

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

- Adams, John

Best Quotes about Words

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

Renard, Jules

The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts.

Parkhurst, Charles H.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

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

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

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

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.

Twain, Mark

10.

The 500 most commonly used words have an average of 28 meanings each.

11.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

12.

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

Ellison, Ralph

13.

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

14.

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

Arendt, Hannah

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Kirchenbaum

18.

Bu is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

19.

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

20.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Byron, Lord

21.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

Bachelard, Gaston

22.

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

Eliot, T. S.

23.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

Yeats, William Butler

24.

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

Phillips, Wendell

25.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

26.

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

Silesius, Angelus

27.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

29.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

30.

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

Mohammed

31.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

32.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

33.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

34.

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

Proverb, Chinese

35.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

36.

You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.

Carnegie, Dale

37.

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

Idle, Eric

38.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

Kraus, Karl

39.

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.

40.

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

Stalin, Joseph

41.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

42.

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

Gladden, W.

43.

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

Card, Orson Scott

44.

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

Hubbard, Ruth

45.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

46.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

47.

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

Cather, Willa

48.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

49.

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

50.

There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them --isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?

Havel, Vaclav