Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Woolf, Virginia

Best Quotes about Words

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Kirchenbaum

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

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

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

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

10.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

11.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

12.

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

Zinsser, William

13.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

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.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Diller, Phyllis

20.

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

21.

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.

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 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

25.

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

26.

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

Eliot, T. S.

27.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

28.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

29.

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

Card, Orson Scott

30.

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

Reid, Thomas

31.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

32.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

33.

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

Renard, Jules

34.

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

Proverb, Chinese

35.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

39.

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

40.

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

Walesa, Lech

41.

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

42.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Phillips, Wendell

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Ellison, Ralph

50.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel