Motivational Quotes

Words

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

Best Quotes about Words

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

Kirchenbaum

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

Lao-Tzu

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

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.

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

Card, Orson Scott

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

Silesius, Angelus

Words of love, are works of love.

Alger, William R.

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

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

Rohn, Jim

10.

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

11.

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

Wright, Steven

12.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

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

17.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

18.

Words are all we have.

Beckett, Samuel

19.

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

Proverb, Spanish

20.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

21.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

22.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

23.

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

Diller, Phyllis

24.

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

25.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

26.

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

Zinsser, William

27.

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

Reid, Thomas

28.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

29.

You can stroke people with words.

30.

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

Twain, Mark

31.

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

32.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

34.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Twain, Mark

36.

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

Phillips, Wendell

37.

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

Cather, Willa

38.

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

Walesa, Lech

39.

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

40.

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

Proverb, Chinese

41.

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

Joubert, Joseph

42.

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

43.

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

Stalin, Joseph

44.

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

45.

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

Idle, Eric

46.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

47.

All words are part true and part false.

Kahn, Master

48.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

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