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

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

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

Card, Orson Scott

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

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

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

The supply of words in the world market is plentiful but the demand is falling. Let deeds follow words now.

Walesa, Lech

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

Kraus, Karl

10.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

11.

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

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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

13.

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

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

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

Diller, Phyllis

16.

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

Renard, Jules

17.

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

Proverb, Spanish

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Zinsser, William

21.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

22.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

23.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

24.

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

25.

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

Lao-Tzu

26.

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

Gladden, W.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

33.

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

34.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

35.

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.

36.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

37.

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

Arendt, Hannah

38.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

39.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

42.

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

43.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

44.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

45.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

46.

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

47.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

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

Platen

49.

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

50.

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

Proverb, Chinese