Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Lao-Tzu

Best Quotes about Words

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

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

Fripp, Patricia

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

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

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

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

Diller, Phyllis

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

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

Kirchenbaum

10.

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

11.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

12.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

13.

The two most beautiful words in the English language are: Check Enclosed.

Parker, Dorothy

14.

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

Walesa, Lech

15.

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.

16.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

17.

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

Rohn, Jim

18.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

19.

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

20.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

22.

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

Platen

23.

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

Mohammed

24.

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.

25.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

26.

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

Silesius, Angelus

27.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

28.

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

29.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

30.

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

Proverb, Chinese

31.

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

Ellison, Ralph

32.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

33.

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

34.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

35.

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

36.

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

Kraus, Karl

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.

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

Twain, Mark

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Joubert, Joseph

42.

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

Renard, Jules

43.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

44.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

45.

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.

46.

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

Adams, John

47.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

48.

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

Lao-Tzu

49.

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

50.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston