Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Proverb, Chinese

Best Quotes about Words

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

Woolf, Virginia

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

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 from the mouth is like a stone from a sling.

Proverb, Spanish

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

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

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

Arendt, Hannah

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

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

10.

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

11.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

12.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

13.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

14.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

15.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

17.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

18.

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

Platen

19.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

20.

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

Diller, Phyllis

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

Wright, Steven

23.

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.

24.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

25.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

26.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

29.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

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.

33.

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

Proverb, Chinese

34.

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

Zinsser, William

35.

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

36.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

37.

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

Lowell, James Russell

38.

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

Gladden, W.

39.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

40.

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

Stalin, Joseph

41.

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

42.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

43.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

44.

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

45.

You can stroke people with words.

46.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

47.

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

Cather, Willa

48.

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