Motivational Quotes

Words

All words are part true and part false.

- Kahn, Master

Best Quotes about Words

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

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

You can stroke people with words.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Reid, Thomas

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

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

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

10.

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

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

Twain, Mark

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Walesa, Lech

17.

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

18.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

19.

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

Wright, Steven

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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.

22.

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

Silesius, Angelus

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

26.

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

Stalin, Joseph

27.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

28.

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

Eliot, T. S.

29.

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

Card, Orson Scott

30.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

Rohn, Jim

32.

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

Kraus, Karl

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

35.

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

Diller, Phyllis

36.

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

Zinsser, William

37.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

38.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

Ellison, Ralph

41.

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

42.

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

Woolf, Virginia

43.

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

44.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

45.

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

46.

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

Renard, Jules

47.

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

Lao-Tzu

48.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

49.

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

50.

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