Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Zinsser, William

Best Quotes about Words

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

You can stroke people with words.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

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.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

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

10.

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

11.

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

Woolf, Virginia

12.

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

13.

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

Ellison, Ralph

14.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

15.

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

Joubert, Joseph

16.

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

Walesa, Lech

17.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

Words are the money of fools.

Hobbes, Thomas

19.

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

20.

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

Adams, John

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.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Wright, Steven

25.

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

26.

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

Eliot, T. S.

27.

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

28.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

29.

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

Twain, Mark

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

33.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

34.

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

Fripp, Patricia

35.

Our great men have written words of wisdom to be used when hardship must be faced. Life obliges us with hardship so the words of wisdom shouldn't go to waste.

L'Chiam

36.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

38.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

39.

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

Card, Orson Scott

40.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

41.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

42.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

43.

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

Phillips, Wendell

44.

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

Stalin, Joseph

45.

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

Proverb, Chinese

46.

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

Kirchenbaum

47.

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

Proverb, Spanish

48.

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

49.

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

Idle, Eric

50.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug