Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

Adams, John

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

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

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Card, Orson Scott

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

10.

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

11.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

12.

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

13.

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

Phillips, Wendell

14.

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

15.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

16.

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

17.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

24.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

25.

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

Ellison, Ralph

26.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Kirchenbaum

31.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

32.

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

Reid, Thomas

33.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

34.

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

Mohammed

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.

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

Lao-Tzu

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.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

42.

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.

43.

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

Proverb, Spanish

44.

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

45.

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

Gladden, W.

46.

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

Parker, Dorothy

47.

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

48.

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

Joubert, Joseph

49.

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

Fripp, Patricia

50.

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

Kraus, Karl