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

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

Gladden, W.

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

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

Silesius, Angelus

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

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

Kirchenbaum

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

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

10.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

11.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

12.

You can stroke people with words.

13.

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

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

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

Stalin, Joseph

16.

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

17.

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

Zinsser, William

18.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

19.

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

20.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

Idle, Eric

22.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

23.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Proverb, Chinese

29.

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

30.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

31.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Cather, Willa

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

35.

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

Wright, Steven

36.

A word from the mouth is like a stone from a sling.

Proverb, Spanish

37.

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

38.

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

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.

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

Card, Orson Scott

41.

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

Phillips, Wendell

42.

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

43.

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

Reid, Thomas

44.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

45.

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

46.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

47.

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

48.

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

Arendt, Hannah

49.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

50.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.