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

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

Cather, Willa

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

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

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Phillips, Wendell

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

10.

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

11.

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

Rohn, Jim

12.

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

Idle, Eric

13.

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.

Burroughs, William S.

14.

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

Woolf, Virginia

15.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

16.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

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 last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

19.

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

20.

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

Adams, John

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Parker, Dorothy

25.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

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

27.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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.

29.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

30.

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

Platen

31.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

32.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

36.

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

37.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

38.

Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

Daumal, Rene

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

41.

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

Silesius, Angelus

42.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

You can stroke people with words.

44.

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

45.

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

Joubert, Joseph

46.

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

47.

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

Kirchenbaum

48.

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

Lao-Tzu

49.

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

50.

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