Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Silesius, Angelus

Best Quotes about Words

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

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

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

Gladden, W.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

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

Ellison, Ralph

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

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

Adams, John

10.

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

11.

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

Platen

12.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

13.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

14.

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

15.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

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

17.

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

Card, Orson Scott

18.

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

19.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

20.

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

21.

The supply of words in the world market is plentiful but the demand is falling. Let deeds follow words now.

Walesa, Lech

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

25.

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

Silesius, Angelus

26.

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

Proverb, Spanish

27.

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

28.

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

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Lao-Tzu

32.

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

Lowell, James Russell

33.

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

Phillips, Wendell

34.

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

Woolf, Virginia

35.

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

Diller, Phyllis

36.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

37.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Cather, Willa

38.

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

39.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

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

41.

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

Parker, Dorothy

42.

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

43.

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

Renard, Jules

44.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

45.

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

Twain, Mark

46.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

Mohammed

49.

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

50.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.