Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

Please God, make my words today sweet and tender, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Wright, Steven

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

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

Rohn, Jim

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

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

Reid, Thomas

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

10.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

The two most beautiful words in the English language are: Check Enclosed.

Parker, Dorothy

12.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

13.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

14.

Bachelard, Gaston

15.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

16.

It is with a word as with an arrow -- once let it loose and it does not return.

17.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

Jordan, June

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Idle, Eric

22.

There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.

Zinsser, William

23.

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

24.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

25.

Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.

Joubert, Joseph

26.

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

Diller, Phyllis

27.

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

Silesius, Angelus

28.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

29.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

30.

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

Phillips, Wendell

31.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

Woolf, Virginia

32.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

33.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

34.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

35.

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

36.

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

Lao-Tzu

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

42.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

Glasgow, Ellen

43.

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

Renard, Jules

44.

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

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Platen

50.

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