Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

Wright, Steven

A word from the mouth is like a stone from a sling.

Proverb, Spanish

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

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Phillips, Wendell

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

Fripp, Patricia

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

Adams, John

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Card, Orson Scott

10.

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

Woolf, Virginia

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

14.

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

15.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

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

Diller, Phyllis

17.

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

Lowell, James Russell

18.

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

19.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

20.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

21.

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

Cather, Willa

22.

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

Zinsser, William

23.

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

24.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

25.

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

Idle, Eric

26.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

27.

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

Stalin, Joseph

28.

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

Kraus, Karl

29.

You can stroke people with words.

30.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

31.

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

Rohn, Jim

32.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

34.

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

Arendt, Hannah

35.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

36.

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

37.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

38.

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

39.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

40.

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

41.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

42.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

43.

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

Mohammed

44.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

46.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

47.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

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.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

50.

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