Motivational Quotes

Words

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.

Best Quotes about Words

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

The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts.

Parkhurst, Charles H.

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

Eliot, T. S.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

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

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Arendt, Hannah

13.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

14.

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

Kirchenbaum

15.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

16.

Burroughs, William S.

17.

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

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.

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

Reid, Thomas

20.

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

Ellison, Ralph

21.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

22.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Lao-Tzu

23.

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

Mohammed

24.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

25.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

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

Idle, Eric

27.

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

28.

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

Cather, Willa

29.

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

30.

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

31.

I have never been hurt by what I have not said.

Coolidge, Calvin

32.

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

Twain, Mark

33.

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.

Stalin, Joseph

34.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

35.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

38.

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

Wright, Steven

39.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

40.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

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

42.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

44.

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

Renard, Jules

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

48.

You can stroke people with words.

49.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

50.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul