Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Reid, Thomas

Best Quotes about Words

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

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

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

10.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

Proverb, Spanish

14.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

15.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

Proverb, Chinese

17.

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

18.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

19.

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

Phillips, Wendell

20.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

21.

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

Woolf, Virginia

22.

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

23.

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

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

25.

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

Kirchenbaum

26.

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

Gladden, W.

27.

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.

28.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

29.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

30.

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

31.

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

Silesius, Angelus

32.

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

33.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

34.

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

35.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

36.

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

Rohn, Jim

37.

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

Zinsser, William

38.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

39.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

40.

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

41.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

42.

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

Idle, Eric

43.

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

44.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

45.

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

Twain, Mark

46.

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

Eliot, T. S.

47.

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

Lao-Tzu

48.

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

Renard, Jules

49.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

50.

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