Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

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

Kraus, Karl

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

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

10.

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

Lowell, James Russell

11.

You can stroke people with words.

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.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

14.

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

Silesius, Angelus

15.

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

16.

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

Adams, John

17.

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

Woolf, Virginia

18.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

19.

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

20.

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

Zinsser, William

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

23.

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

Phillips, Wendell

24.

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

Kirchenbaum

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Reid, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

32.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

33.

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

Fripp, Patricia

34.

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

Mohammed

35.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

Joubert, Joseph

44.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

45.

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

Wright, Steven

46.

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.

47.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

48.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

49.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

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