Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Rohn, Jim

Best Quotes about Words

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Card, Orson Scott

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

Eliot, T. S.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

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

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

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

10.

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

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.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

13.

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

14.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

15.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

17.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

18.

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

Cather, Willa

19.

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

20.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

21.

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

22.

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

Renard, Jules

23.

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

Proverb, Chinese

24.

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

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

Diller, Phyllis

27.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

28.

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

Kirchenbaum

29.

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

30.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

31.

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

Zinsser, William

32.

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

33.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

34.

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

Fripp, Patricia

35.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

36.

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

37.

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

Ellison, Ralph

38.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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.

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

41.

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

Reid, Thomas

42.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

43.

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

Platen

44.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

46.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

47.

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

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 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.

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