Motivational Quotes

Words

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.

Best Quotes about Words

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

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

Fripp, Patricia

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

Coolidge, Calvin

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

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

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

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

Kirchenbaum

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

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

10.

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

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

13.

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

Rohn, Jim

14.

Our lives are fed by kind words and gracious behavior. We are nourished by expressions like excuse me and other such simple courtesies... Rudeness, the absence of the sacrament of consideration, is but another mark that our time-is-money society is lacking in spirituality, if not also in its enjoyment of life.

Hays, Ed

15.

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

16.

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

Adams, John

17.

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

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

Lowell, James Russell

20.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

22.

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

23.

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

Mohammed

24.

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

25.

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

Ibsen, Henrik

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

32.

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

33.

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

Wright, Steven

34.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

35.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

36.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

37.

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

38.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

39.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

40.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

41.

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

Platen

42.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

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

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Kraus, Karl

48.

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

49.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

50.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel