Quotes about words

We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

— Abigail Adams

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

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— John Adams

Words of love, are works of love.

— William R. Alger

When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.

— Gracie Allen

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

— Hannah Arendt

By words the mind is winged.

— Aristophanes

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

— Burt Bacharach

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

The words of the world want to make sentences.

— Gaston Bachelard

Words are all we have.

— Samuel Beckett

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

— Henry Ward Beecher

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.

— John Berger

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.

— Source Unknown

There are words which sever hearts more than sharp swords; there are words the point of which sting the heart through the course of a whole life.

— Frederika Bremer

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.

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

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.

— William S. Burroughs

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

— Robert Burton

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.

— Samuel Butler

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

— Lord Byron

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

— Orson Scott Card

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.

— Dale Carnegie

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.

— Lewis Carroll

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

— Willa Cather

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.

— Stuart Chase

Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the animals don't understand us.

— Malcolm De Chazal

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

— Winston Churchill

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

— Winston Churchill

Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men.

— Confucius

Tsze-Kung asked, saying, is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life? The Master said, Is not Reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

— Confucius

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.

— Cyril Connolly

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

— Joseph Conrad

A word carries far -- very far -- deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Calvin Coolidge

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.

— Rene Daumal

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

— Philip K. Dick

A word is dead when it is said. Some say. I say it just, begins to live that day.

— Emily Dickinson

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

— Phyllis Diller

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

— George Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— Ralph Ellison

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.

— Anatole France

Words represent your intellect. The sound, gesture and movement represent your feelings.

— Patricia Fripp

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

— W. Gladden

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

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one.

— Baltasar Gracian

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.

— Stephan Grellet

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.

— John B. S. Haldane

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

— Harold Robbins Haldeman

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.

— Ed Hays

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

— Ernest Hemingway

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

— Ernest Hemingway

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools.

— Thomas Hobbes

Words are the money of fools.

— Thomas Hobbes

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

— Horace

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

— Horace

Strong words are required for weak principles.

— Doug Horton

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.

— Ruth Hubbard

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

— Pearl Strachan Hurd

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

— Aldous Huxley

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

— Julian S. Huxley

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

— Henrik Ibsen

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

— Eric Idle

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.

— June Jordan

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

— Joseph Joubert

All words are part true and part false.

— Master Kahn

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.

— John Maynard Keynes

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Kirchenbaum

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Lao-Tzu

He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

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 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.

— David Lehman

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

— John Locke

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

— James Russell Lowell

Words can be like baseball bats when used maliciously.

— Sidney Madwed

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

— Mohammed

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

— Dorothy Parker

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

— Charles H. Parkhurst

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

— Wendell Phillips

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

— Platen

In words are seen the state of mind and character and disposition of the speaker.

— Plutarch

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

— Chinese Proverb

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

— Spanish Proverb

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

— Yiddish Proverb

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

— Dan Quayle

A single word often betrays a great design.

— Jean Racine

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

— Thomas Reid

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

— Jules Renard

Words are the small change of thought.

— Jules Renard

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

— Jim Rohn

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.

— Theodore Roosevelt