Quotes about Words
Most popular words quotes
Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men.
A lot of words get spilled as the urge to be understood clashes with an aversion to being understood too well.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
A writer's form of expression may seem quite clear to him, yet obscure to the reader. Why? Because the reader is advancing from language to thought, the writer from thought to language.
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Broadly speaking, the short words are best, and the old words best of all.
Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make clearer.
Without big words, how could many people say small things?
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Words have the power to destroy or heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change the world.
With words we govern people.
Although words exist for the most part for the transmission of ideas, there are some which produce such violent disturbance in our feelings that the role they play in transmission of ideas is lost in the background.
A wound from a tongue is worse than a wound from a sword; for the latter affects only the body, the former the spirit.
A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
A moment's thinking is an hour in words.
You own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams you want to realize. You words are the greatest power you have. The words you choose and their use establish the life you experience.
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know more.
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.
With women the best aphrodisiac is words.
All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
We are all so clumsy...and words are all we have, poor signals like bonfires and flags trying to express what shipwreck is.
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motorshow—full of potential, but temporarily inactive.
A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.
O! Many a shaft at random sent Finds mark the archer little meant! And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that's broken.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
I love you to the limits of speech, and beyond. It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, So the lover must struggle for words.
Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word.
By words the mind is winged.
Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
Words are the small change of thought.
A word is the carving and coloring of a thought, and gives it permanence.
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
Words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.
Words may be deeds.
Humans mop up words like sponges.
Most new words simply disappear, like raindrops falling and soaking into the ground. Only a few get caught in the bucket of public attention, and make their way into dictionaries.
I like good, strong words, that mean something.
A word after a word after a word is power.
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig.
You can taste a word. That's food for thought.
For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.
Words, I think, are the one great, exhaustless charm and resource of life; and to think how people fling them about, and strike, and sting and stab and poison, and go their way and forget.
Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
Words make love with one another.
It is extremely natural for us to see . . . our Thoughts put into the Dress of Words, without which indeed we can scarce have a clear and distinct Idea of them our selves.
Words easy to be understood do often hit the mark, when high and learned ones do only pierce the air.
Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.
It is an old saying, "A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword."
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.
I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.
Be not the slave of Words.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
One's words must glide across the page like a swan moving across the waters. One must be conscious of the movement without a thought of what is causing it to move.
A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Words are the legs of the mind; they bear it about, carry it from point to point, bed it down at night, and keep it off the ground and out of the marsh and mists.
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Words are like children. The more care you lavish on them, the more they demand.
You can stroke people with words.
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
With words, as with bricks, tearing down is easier than building up.
Perhaps it's no coincidence that the word words is an anagram of sword. Well-used words cut through ambiguity and confusion like a sharp sword in the hands of an expert swordsman.
Each word comes with a biography. These words have fascinating stories to tell, if only we take the time to listen.
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
Words themselves are the intimate attire of thoughts and feelings.
A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.
Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
Words are the bugles of social change.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
What happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.
Words are such an integral part of our consciousness that we believe they have always existed, like stones and grass and bushes. But this is not true.
Like people, words are born, grow up, get married, have children, and even die. They may be very old, like man and wife and home. They may be very young, like Sudoku and ginormous.
My words are little jars For you to take and put upon a shelf.
Words are restless bundles of energy ever ready to explode in our minds like bombs, to blossom in our minds like flowers.
The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
To reason with poorly chosen words is like using a pair of scales with inaccurate weights.
Apt words have pow'r to swage The tumors of a troubled mind, And are as balm to fester'd wounds.
Words, he concluded, are a commodity in which there is never any slump.
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words, shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.
Words were a lens to focus one's mind.
He that useth many Words for the explaining any Subject, doth, like the Cuttle-Fish, hide himself; for the most part, in his own Ink.
A word has its use, Or, like a man, it will soon have a grave.
Words in the mind are like colors on the palette of the artist. The more colors we have access to, the easier it is to create a captivating picture on the canvas, and the more practice we give to using those many colors appropriately and uniquely, the more likely we will be to create a masterpiece of self expression.
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from our enemies.
The word ... is not only a key; it may also be a fetter.
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and, once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.
I fell in love—that is the only expression I can think of—at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
You may choose your word like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart.
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
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.
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.
The tongue like a sharp knife ... Kills without drawing blood.
Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.
Words are loaded pistols.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Most humans either harm or are harmed by words. The rest is a small minority.
