Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Glasgow, Ellen

Best Quotes about Words

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

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

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

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

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

Kirchenbaum

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

Reid, Thomas

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.

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

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

14.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

15.

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

Stalin, Joseph

16.

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

17.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

18.

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

Platen

19.

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

Card, Orson Scott

20.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

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

26.

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

Lowell, James Russell

27.

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

28.

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

Idle, Eric

29.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

30.

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

Zinsser, William

31.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

32.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

33.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

34.

Gentle words, quiet words, are after all the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more compelling, more prevailing.

Gladden, W.

35.

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

Diller, Phyllis

36.

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

Silesius, Angelus

37.

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

38.

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

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

40.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

41.

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

Wright, Steven

42.

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

Mohammed

43.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

44.

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

Walesa, Lech

45.

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

Adams, John

46.

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

47.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

48.

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

49.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

50.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace