Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Glasgow, Ellen

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

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

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

Cather, Willa

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.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

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

Stalin, Joseph

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

Card, Orson Scott

10.

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

Platen

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

14.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

15.

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

Adams, John

16.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

20.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

21.

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.

22.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

23.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

24.

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

Gladden, W.

25.

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

Diller, Phyllis

26.

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

27.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

28.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

31.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

32.

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

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

35.

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

36.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

37.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

43.

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

Woolf, Virginia

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Ellison, Ralph

46.

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

47.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

48.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

49.

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

Proverb, Spanish

50.

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