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

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Renard, Jules

Bu is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Proverb, Spanish

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

Ellison, Ralph

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

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

Lao-Tzu

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

10.

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

Proverb, Chinese

11.

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

12.

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

Platen

13.

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

Reid, Thomas

14.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

15.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

18.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

19.

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

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

Kraus, Karl

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

24.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

25.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

26.

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

Wright, Steven

27.

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

28.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

29.

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

30.

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

Lowell, James Russell

31.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

Kirchenbaum

33.

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

Gladden, W.

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

39.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

41.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

42.

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

Phillips, Wendell

43.

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

44.

Lehman, David

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Adams, John

48.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

49.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

50.

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