Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

Ibsen, Henrik

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

Glasgow, Ellen

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

Lehman, David

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

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

10.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Adams, Henry Brooks

11.

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

12.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

13.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

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.

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

Adams, John

16.

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

17.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Spencer, Herbert

23.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

25.

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

Silesius, Angelus

26.

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

Diller, Phyllis

27.

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

Stalin, Joseph

28.

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

29.

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

Proverb, Spanish

30.

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

Eliot, T. S.

31.

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

32.

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

Platen

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

35.

You can stroke people with words.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Zinsser, William

43.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

44.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

45.

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

Arendt, Hannah

46.

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

Kraus, Karl

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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