Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Renard, Jules

Best Quotes about Words

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

Zinsser, William

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

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

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

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

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

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

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

Renard, Jules

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

Lowell, James Russell

10.

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

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Silesius, Angelus

13.

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

Card, Orson Scott

14.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

15.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

16.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

17.

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

Kirchenbaum

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

23.

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.

24.

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

Kraus, Karl

25.

You can stroke people with words.

26.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

27.

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

28.

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

Ellison, Ralph

29.

Why do social workers use five-syllable words when dealing with juvenile delinquents?

30.

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

31.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

34.

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

Idle, Eric

35.

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.

36.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Phillips, Wendell

38.

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

Stalin, Joseph

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

42.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

43.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

44.

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

Diller, Phyllis

45.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

46.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

50.

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