Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Kirchenbaum

Best Quotes about Words

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

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

Proverb, Spanish

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

Adams, John

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

10.

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

Idle, Eric

11.

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

12.

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

Diller, Phyllis

13.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

18.

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

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

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

Kirchenbaum

21.

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

22.

You can stroke people with words.

23.

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

Eliot, T. S.

24.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

25.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

26.

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

Proverb, Chinese

27.

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

Wright, Steven

28.

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

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

30.

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

Arendt, Hannah

31.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

32.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Twain, Mark

33.

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

Lao-Tzu

34.

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

Reid, Thomas

35.

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

36.

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

Walesa, Lech

37.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Platen

41.

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

Fripp, Patricia

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

44.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

45.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

46.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

47.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

48.

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

Rohn, Jim

49.

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.

50.

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