Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Lao-Tzu

Best Quotes about Words

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

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

Reid, Thomas

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

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

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

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Kirchenbaum

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.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Idle, Eric

13.

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

Cather, Willa

14.

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

15.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

17.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

Kraus, Karl

18.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

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

21.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

23.

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

24.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

25.

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.

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

Adams, John

28.

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

Diller, Phyllis

29.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

30.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

31.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

32.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

33.

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

Renard, Jules

34.

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

Parker, Dorothy

35.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

36.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

37.

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

38.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

39.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

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

Twain, Mark

42.

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

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

45.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

46.

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

47.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

48.

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

49.

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

Rohn, Jim

50.

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