Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Proverb, Spanish

Best Quotes about Words

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

Woolf, Virginia

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.

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

Zinsser, William

You can stroke people with words.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

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

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

13.

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

14.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

15.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

16.

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

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

18.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Ellison, Ralph

20.

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.

21.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Proverb, Spanish

26.

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

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

29.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

30.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

32.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

33.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

34.

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

Parker, Dorothy

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Diller, Phyllis

38.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Lao-Tzu

40.

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

41.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

Silesius, Angelus

44.

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

Idle, Eric

45.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

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.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

48.

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.

49.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

50.

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