Motivational Quotes

Words

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

- Spencer, Herbert

Best Quotes about Words

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

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

Ibsen, Henrik

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

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

10.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

11.

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

Silesius, Angelus

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Eliot, T. S.

15.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

16.

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

Proverb, Spanish

17.

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

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Zinsser, William

20.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

22.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

23.

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

Fripp, Patricia

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Our great men have written words of wisdom to be used when hardship must be faced. Life obliges us with hardship so the words of wisdom shouldn't go to waste.

L'Chiam

28.

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

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

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

Adams, John

32.

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

Lowell, James Russell

33.

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

34.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

35.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

36.

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

Kirchenbaum

37.

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

38.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Card, Orson Scott

43.

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

Stalin, Joseph

44.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

45.

You can stroke people with words.

46.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

47.

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

48.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

49.

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

Lao-Tzu

50.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.