Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Reid, Thomas

Best Quotes about Words

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

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

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

Platen

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

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

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

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

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.

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

Wright, Steven

10.

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

Adams, John

11.

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

12.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

13.

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

Fripp, Patricia

14.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

15.

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

16.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

17.

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

Proverb, Spanish

18.

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

19.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

20.

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

Stalin, Joseph

21.

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

Renard, Jules

22.

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

Card, Orson Scott

23.

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

Lao-Tzu

24.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

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.

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

27.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

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

Kirchenbaum

30.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

31.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

32.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

33.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

34.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

35.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

36.

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.

37.

You can stroke people with words.

38.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

39.

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

Silesius, Angelus

40.

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

41.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

42.

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

43.

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

Phillips, Wendell

44.

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

45.

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

Rohn, Jim

46.

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

Diller, Phyllis

47.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.

Arendt, Hannah

48.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

49.

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

Idle, Eric

50.

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