Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Proverb, Spanish

Best Quotes about Words

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

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

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.

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

Card, Orson Scott

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

Cather, Willa

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

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

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

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

Kirchenbaum

10.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

Glasgow, Ellen

12.

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

13.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why --but the editorialists forget it --terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.

Berger, John

17.

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

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

Lowell, James Russell

20.

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

Wright, Steven

21.

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

Platen

22.

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

Proverb, Spanish

23.

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

Zinsser, William

24.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

25.

You can stroke people with words.

26.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

27.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

Ibsen, Henrik

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.

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

Joubert, Joseph

31.

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

Fripp, Patricia

32.

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.

33.

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

Phillips, Wendell

34.

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

Ellison, Ralph

35.

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

Adams, John

36.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

37.

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

38.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

40.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

41.

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

42.

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

43.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Rohn, Jim

47.

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

48.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

49.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean