Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

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

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Hemingway, Ernest

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

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

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

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

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

Ellison, Ralph

10.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

11.

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

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

Wright, Steven

16.

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

Zinsser, William

17.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

18.

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

Walesa, Lech

19.

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

Card, Orson Scott

20.

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

21.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

22.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

23.

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.

24.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

28.

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

29.

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

Twain, Mark

30.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Proverb, Chinese

34.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

35.

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

Parker, Dorothy

36.

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

37.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

38.

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

39.

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

Diller, Phyllis

40.

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

Reid, Thomas

41.

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

42.

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

Stalin, Joseph

43.

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

44.

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

Joubert, Joseph

45.

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

46.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

Lehman, David

49.

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

Silesius, Angelus