Motivational Quotes

Words

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.

Best Quotes about Words

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

Ellison, Ralph

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

Renard, Jules

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

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

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

10.

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

Woolf, Virginia

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Platen

14.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

15.

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

16.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

18.

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

Kirchenbaum

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.

Arendt, Hannah

23.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

24.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

25.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

26.

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

Lowell, James Russell

27.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

28.

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

Proverb, Chinese

29.

The written word can be erased -- not so with the spoken word.

30.

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

Gladden, W.

31.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

32.

You can stroke people with words.

33.

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

Fripp, Patricia

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

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.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

39.

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

40.

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

Reid, Thomas

41.

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

42.

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

Wright, Steven

43.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

44.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

45.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

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

47.

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

Lao-Tzu

48.

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.

49.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

50.

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

Adams, John