Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Words

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

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

Wright, Steven

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

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

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

Gladden, W.

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

The supply of words in the world market is plentiful but the demand is falling. Let deeds follow words now.

Walesa, Lech

10.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

11.

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

12.

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

Ellison, Ralph

13.

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

14.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

15.

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

16.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

17.

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

Rohn, Jim

18.

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

Parker, Dorothy

19.

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

Proverb, Spanish

20.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

23.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

24.

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

Diller, Phyllis

25.

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

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

Twain, Mark

27.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

28.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

29.

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

30.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

31.

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

Proverb, Chinese

32.

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

33.

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

Phillips, Wendell

34.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

35.

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

Twain, Mark

36.

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

Renard, Jules

37.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

38.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

41.

You can stroke people with words.

42.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

44.

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

45.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Lao-Tzu

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Platen

49.

You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.

Carnegie, Dale

50.

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

Kirchenbaum