Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Walesa, Lech

Best Quotes about Words

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

Zinsser, William

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

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

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

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

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

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

10.

Political correctness is simply a speed bump in the traffic of truth, free thought and speech.

11.

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.

12.

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

Arendt, Hannah

13.

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

Twain, Mark

14.

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

Proverb, Chinese

15.

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

16.

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

Gladden, W.

17.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

18.

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

Renard, Jules

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

21.

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

Parker, Dorothy

22.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

23.

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

Adams, John

24.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Cather, Willa

28.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

29.

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

Eliot, T. S.

30.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

31.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

32.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

33.

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

Kirchenbaum

34.

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

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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.

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

Lowell, James Russell

39.

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

Platen

40.

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

Reid, Thomas

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 of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

43.

Our lives are fed by kind words and gracious behavior. We are nourished by expressions like excuse me and other such simple courtesies... Rudeness, the absence of the sacrament of consideration, is but another mark that our time-is-money society is lacking in spirituality, if not also in its enjoyment of life.

Hays, Ed

44.

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

Lao-Tzu

45.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

46.

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

Fripp, Patricia

47.

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

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.

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

50.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean