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

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

Parker, Dorothy

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.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

Huxley, Julian S.

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

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

Kirchenbaum

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

10.

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

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Horace

13.

You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.

Carnegie, Dale

14.

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

Lao-Tzu

15.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

16.

A single word often betrays a great design.

Racine, Jean

17.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

18.

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

19.

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

Twain, Mark

20.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Byron, Lord

21.

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

22.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

23.

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

Diller, Phyllis

24.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

25.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

Wright, Steven

27.

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

28.

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

Renard, Jules

29.

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

30.

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

Idle, Eric

31.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

32.

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

33.

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

Haldeman, Harold Robbins

34.

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.

35.

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

Adams, John

36.

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

Reid, Thomas

37.

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

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

40.

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

Joubert, Joseph

41.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

42.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

43.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

44.

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

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

46.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

47.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

48.

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

Rohn, Jim

49.

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

50.

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

Hemingway, Ernest