Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Lao-Tzu

Best Quotes about Words

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Card, Orson Scott

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

Kirchenbaum

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

Twain, Mark

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

Cather, Willa

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

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

Phillips, Wendell

10.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

11.

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

12.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

13.

You can stroke people with words.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Gladden, W.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

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

Parker, Dorothy

21.

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

Idle, Eric

22.

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

23.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

24.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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.

26.

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

Walesa, Lech

27.

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

28.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

29.

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

Reid, Thomas

30.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

31.

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

Zinsser, William

32.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

33.

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

34.

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

Stalin, Joseph

35.

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

Glasgow, Ellen

36.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

41.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

42.

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

Kraus, Karl

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Diller, Phyllis

46.

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

Platen

47.

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

Silesius, Angelus

48.

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

49.

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

Wright, Steven

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell