Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

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

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

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

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

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

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

Arendt, Hannah

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Fripp, Patricia

13.

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

Kirchenbaum

14.

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

Reid, Thomas

15.

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

16.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

17.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

Rohn, Jim

18.

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

Zinsser, William

19.

Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.

Joubert, Joseph

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.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

22.

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.

23.

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

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

Card, Orson Scott

25.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Proverb, Spanish

34.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

35.

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

36.

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

Renard, Jules

37.

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

Adams, John

38.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

All words are part true and part false.