Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Waugh, Evelyn

Best Quotes about Words

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

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Platen

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

Cather, Willa

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

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

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

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.

10.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

12.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

13.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

14.

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

Card, Orson Scott

15.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

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

21.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

22.

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

Twain, Mark

23.

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

24.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

25.

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

Walesa, Lech

26.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Wright, Steven

30.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

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 are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

33.

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

Phillips, Wendell

34.

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

Silesius, Angelus

35.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

36.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

Proverb, Spanish

41.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

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.

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

44.

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

Kirchenbaum

45.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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.