Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

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

Wright, Steven

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

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

Silesius, Angelus

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Stalin, Joseph

10.

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

Parker, Dorothy

11.

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

Fripp, Patricia

12.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

13.

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

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

16.

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

Cather, Willa

17.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

18.

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.

19.

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

Woolf, Virginia

20.

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

Mohammed

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Kraus, Karl

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

26.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

30.

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

Card, Orson Scott

31.

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

32.

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

Adams, John

33.

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

Zinsser, William

34.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

35.

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

Rohn, Jim

36.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

37.

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

Arendt, Hannah

38.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Proverb, Chinese

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

45.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

46.

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

47.

Twain, Mark