Motivational Quotes

Words

Words are loaded pistols.

- Sartre, Jean-Paul

Best Quotes about Words

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

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

Stalin, Joseph

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Joubert, Joseph

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

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

Lao-Tzu

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

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

10.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

11.

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

Adams, John

12.

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

Zinsser, William

13.

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

Reid, Thomas

14.

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

Idle, Eric

15.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

17.

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

Arendt, Hannah

18.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

19.

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

Twain, Mark

20.

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

Proverb, Chinese

21.

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

Diller, Phyllis

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Phillips, Wendell

31.

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

32.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Ellison, Ralph

38.

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.

39.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

41.

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

42.

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

Kraus, Karl

43.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

44.

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

Parker, Dorothy

45.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbors, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

Butler, Samuel

47.

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

48.

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

Wright, Steven

49.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

50.

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