Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

Twain, Mark

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

Kirchenbaum

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

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

Kraus, Karl

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

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

Stalin, Joseph

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

10.

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

Joubert, Joseph

11.

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

Card, Orson Scott

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.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

Proverb, Spanish

15.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

16.

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

Phillips, Wendell

17.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

20.

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

Zinsser, William

21.

Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs.

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

22.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

23.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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.

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.

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

27.

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

Mohammed

28.

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

Walesa, Lech

29.

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

Renard, Jules

30.

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

31.

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

Adams, John

32.

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

Diller, Phyllis

33.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

34.

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

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

39.

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

Lao-Tzu

40.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

47.

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why --but the editorialists forget it --terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.

Berger, John

48.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

49.

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

Reid, Thomas

50.

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

Fripp, Patricia