Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Lao-Tzu

Best Quotes about Words

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

You can stroke people with words.

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

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

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

Silesius, Angelus

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

Hubbard, Ruth

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

Twain, Mark

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Twain, Mark

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

13.

The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

14.

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

Gladden, W.

15.

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

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

Wright, Steven

18.

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

Walesa, Lech

19.

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

Proverb, Chinese

20.

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

Phillips, Wendell

21.

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

22.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

Haldane, John B. S.

23.

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

24.

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

Parker, Dorothy

25.

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

26.

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

Lao-Tzu

27.

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

Joubert, Joseph

28.

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

Mohammed

29.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

30.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Card, Orson Scott

34.

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

Idle, Eric

35.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

36.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

37.

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

Adams, John

38.

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

Diller, Phyllis

39.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

40.

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

41.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

Stalin, Joseph

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master