Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Haldeman, Harold Robbins

Best Quotes about Words

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

Proverb, Chinese

For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

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

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

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

Lao-Tzu

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

Silesius, Angelus

10.

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

11.

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

Parker, Dorothy

12.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

15.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

Walesa, Lech

17.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

18.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

19.

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

Wright, Steven

20.

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

Joubert, Joseph

21.

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

22.

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

Lowell, James Russell

23.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

24.

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

Reid, Thomas

25.

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

26.

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

Stalin, Joseph

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

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.

29.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

30.

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

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

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

33.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

34.

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

35.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

36.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

37.

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

Phillips, Wendell

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

41.

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

Platen

42.

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

43.

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

44.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

45.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

46.

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

Cather, Willa

47.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

Diller, Phyllis

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.

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

Kraus, Karl