Quotes about words

What you keep by you, you may change and mend but words, once spoken, can never be recalled.

— Earl of Roscommon

A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

— George Santayana

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.

— Rose Saperstein

Words are loaded pistols.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

A word too much always defeats its purpose.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

— William Shakespeare

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

— Angelus Silesius

It is with words as with sunbeams -- the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

— Robert Southey

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Joseph Stalin

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

— Henry David Thoreau

Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.

— Edward Thorndike

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

— Alexis De Tocqueville

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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.

— Mark Twain

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.

— Mark Twain

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

— Mark Twain

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

— Source Unknown

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

— Source Unknown

When thoughts fails of words, they find imagination waiting at their elbow to teach a new language without words.

— Source Unknown

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

— Source Unknown

Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.

— Source Unknown

You can stroke people with words.

— Source Unknown

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

— Source Unknown

One thing you can give and still keep is your word.

— Source Unknown

It is with a word as with an arrow -- once let it loose and it does not return.

— Source Unknown

Please God, make my words today sweet and tender, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.

— Source Unknown

Political correctness is simply a speed bump in the traffic of truth, free thought and speech.

— Source Unknown

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

— Source Unknown

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

— Lech Walesa

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

— Izaak Walton

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

— Evelyn Waugh

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.

— Noah Webster

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Steven Wright

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.

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Zinsser

With enough verbs and prepositions, anything can happen.

— Michael Wakcher

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain

— William Shakespeare

You are going to use this courtroom to kill me? I am going to fight for my life one way or another. You should let me do it with words.

— Charles Manson

It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.

— Stephen King

If I where to describe myself in one word, a new word should be made.

— anonimus

Words alike flames, they burn. leaving nothing, not even blood, but ashes, which are never identified, never retraceable and ridiculously impossible to be put back together again.

— Charles Adrian Pacis

Words so vascular and alive they would bleed if you cut them, words that walked and ran.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let" shouldn't bee in the same sentence as "ME WIN" at ALL!

— BPBEE

The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.

— Dejan Stojanovic

How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.

— Dejan Stojanovic

When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.

— Dejan Stojanovic

A word only writes its night and rides its dream.

— Dejan Stojanovic

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

— Vladimir Nabakov

The original thoughts are like the rare and precious jewels, but remember there has always been a big market with a large number of buyers, sellers and suppliers of the imitation jewellery.

— Anuj Somany

When a battle of wits begins between two people, the smarter of the two will concede knowing that the other person is unable to see any point of view other than their own.

— threston, t.r.

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?

— Vaclav Havel