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

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

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

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

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

Kirchenbaum

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

Idle, Eric

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

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

Ellison, Ralph

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.

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

Proverb, Chinese

10.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Adams, John

12.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

14.

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

Parker, Dorothy

15.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

17.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

22.

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

Lowell, James Russell

23.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

24.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Silesius, Angelus

26.

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

27.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

32.

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

Cather, Willa

33.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

Mohammed

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

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

Fripp, Patricia

37.

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

38.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

39.

Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.

Joubert, Joseph

40.

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

Phillips, Wendell

41.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Card, Orson Scott

45.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

46.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

47.

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

48.

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

49.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

50.

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

Coolidge, Calvin