Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Words

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

Lao-Tzu

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

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

Stalin, Joseph

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

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

10.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Ellison, Ralph

13.

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

14.

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

Card, Orson Scott

15.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

17.

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

Lowell, James Russell

18.

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

19.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

20.

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

21.

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

Diller, Phyllis

22.

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

23.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

25.

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

Cather, Willa

26.

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

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.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

29.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

30.

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

31.

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

Arendt, Hannah

32.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

33.

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

34.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

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.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

37.

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

38.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

39.

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

Parker, Dorothy

40.

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

Adams, John

41.

You can stroke people with words.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Eliot, T. S.

45.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

46.

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

Phillips, Wendell

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Proverb, Spanish