Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Words

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

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

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

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

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

Idle, Eric

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

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

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

Kraus, Karl

10.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

12.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

13.

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.

14.

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

Lowell, James Russell

15.

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

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.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

18.

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

19.

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

Reid, Thomas

20.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

21.

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

Proverb, Chinese

22.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

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

Mohammed

26.

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

27.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

28.

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

29.

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

Renard, Jules

30.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

31.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

33.

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

Eliot, T. S.

34.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

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.

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

Cather, Willa

37.

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

38.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

Silesius, Angelus

41.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

42.

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

Platen

43.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

44.

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

Walesa, Lech

45.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

46.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

47.

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

48.

You can stroke people with words.

49.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

50.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean