Motivational Quotes

Words

Words are all we have.

- Beckett, Samuel

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

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

Nothing can throw thee into the infernal abyss so much as this detested word -- heed well! -- this mine and thine.

Silesius, Angelus

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

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

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

You can stroke people with words.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

I don't give a damn for man that can spell a word only one way.

Twain, Mark

10.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

11.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

12.

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

Woolf, Virginia

13.

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.

14.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

15.

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

Kraus, Karl

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Walesa, Lech

20.

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

Phillips, Wendell

21.

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

22.

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

Kirchenbaum

23.

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

Card, Orson Scott

24.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

25.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

26.

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

Reid, Thomas

27.

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

28.

Like an arrow to its mark flies the word good man's word.

Platen

29.

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

Adams, John

30.

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

31.

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

Stalin, Joseph

32.

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

33.

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

Wright, Steven

34.

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

Cather, Willa

35.

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

Fripp, Patricia

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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.

46.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

47.

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

48.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

50.

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