Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Words

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

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.

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

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

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

Card, Orson Scott

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Eliot, T. S.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

15.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Adams, Henry Brooks

16.

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

17.

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

Ellison, Ralph

18.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

Phillips, Wendell

22.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

23.

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

24.

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

Zinsser, William

25.

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

26.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

27.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

29.

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

Fripp, Patricia

30.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

31.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

32.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

33.

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

34.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

38.

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

39.

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

Proverb, Chinese

40.

You can stroke people with words.

41.

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

Parker, Dorothy

42.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

47.

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

Diller, Phyllis

48.

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

Walesa, Lech

49.

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