Motivational Quotes

Words

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Words

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

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Ellison, Ralph

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

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

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

Stalin, Joseph

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

Waugh, Evelyn

10.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Horace

11.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

12.

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

Card, Orson Scott

13.

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.

14.

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

Lowell, James Russell

15.

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

Silesius, Angelus

16.

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

Parker, Dorothy

17.

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

Hurd, Pearl Strachan

18.

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

Gladden, W.

19.

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

20.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Santayana, George

21.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

Platen

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Churchill, Winston

26.

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

27.

Strong words are required for weak principles.

Horton, Doug

28.

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

Twain, Mark

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Arendt, Hannah

33.

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

34.

Words are loaded pistols.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

35.

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

Reid, Thomas

36.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

37.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Churchill, Winston

38.

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

Zinsser, William

39.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Proverb, Yiddish

40.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

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

Lao-Tzu

42.

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

43.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Bachelard, Gaston

44.

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

45.

You can stroke people with words.

46.

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

47.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

48.

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

Proverb, Spanish

49.

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

50.

A single word often betrays a great design.