Words
- All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.--Kahlil Gibran (Sand and Foam)
- Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the cruelest words.--Joyce Brothers
- 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
- As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.--Benjamin Franklin
- Be careful of the words you say,
Keep them short and sweet.
You never know, from day to day,
Which ones you'll have to eat.--Anonymous
- But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.--George Gordon Byron
- By words we learn thoughts, and by thoughts we learn life.--Jean Baptiste Girard
- Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.--Edward Thorndike
- Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?--Marcel Marceau
- Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.--Robert E. Lee
- For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. Their articulation represents a complete, lived experience.--Ingrid Bengis
- God wove a web of loveliness, of clouds and stars and birds, but made not anything at all so beautiful as words.--Anna Hempstead Branch
- The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.--Luke 6:45 (NIV)
- Good words are worth much, and cost little.--George Herbert (Jacula Prudentum)
- A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence.--Barbara Walters
- However many holy words you read,
However many you speak,
What good will they do you
If you do not act on upon them?--Buddha
- I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.--Emily Dickinson
- I like good strong words that mean something.--Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)
- If language is as inextricably tied up with consciousness as it seems to be, then the continuing diminishment of our inclination to use it to express in letters the times in which we live could mean that an element of human consciousness itself is on the verge of disappearing. --Anonymous
- 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.--J. B. Phillips
- If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.--Nelson Mandela
- If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.--Robert Southey
- Imagination is the first step in creation whether in words or trifles. The mental pattern must always precede the material form.--William W. Atkinson
- In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.--Edward de Bono (Serious Creativity)
- It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.--Lewis Mumford (The Transformation of Man)
- It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.--Joan Baez
- It's always a bit of a struggle to get the words right, whether we're a Hemingway or a few fathoms below his level.--Rene J. Cappon (Associated Press Guide to News Writing)
- Kind words are a creative force, a power that concurs in the building up of all that is good, and energy that showers blessings upon the world.-- Lawrence G. Lovasik (The Hidden Power of Kindness)
- Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grows together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.--Henry Hazlitt (Thinking as a Science)
- Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.--George Steiner
- The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.--Thomas Jefferson
- My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything.--Joseph Conrad (Nigger of the Narcissus )
- Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"--John Greenleaf Whittier
- Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much ... of my writing is verbal painting.--Elizabeth Bowen (in Elizabeth Bowen by Glendinning)
- One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.--James Earl Jones
- One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.--Ariel and Will Durrant
- Our words should be purrs instead of hisses.--Kathrine Palmer Peterson
- Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.--Kahlil Gibran
- The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change a defeat into victory, and to save an empire.--Emile de Girardin
- The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.--Dorothy Nevill
- The six most important words: I admit I made a mistake The five most important words: You did a good job The four most important words: What is your opinion? The three most important words: If you please The two most important words: Thank you The one least important word: I.--Anonymous
- So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.--John Locke
- The teachings of elegant sayings
Should be collected when one can.
For the supreme gift of words of wisdom,
Any price will be paid.--Siddha Nagarjuna
- Those who really know and care about you can hear you even when you haven’t spoken a word.--Steven Aitchison
- To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.--Truman Capote
- To words and how they live between us, to us and how we live between the words.--Carrie Newcomer
- "A unification of fact and value" is an excellent definition, it seems to me, of any given word in any given language. So words bloom into novels ... and the large problem grows out of the small: to assemble words so they work together with something approaching the same force of unified fact and value that each word has accrued in its long, accumulating passage through history. Words are the model, words are the tools, words are the boards, words are the nails.--Richard Rhodes (How to Write)
- Watch your thoughts, they become your words
Watch your words, they become your actions
Watch your actions, they become your habits
Watch your habits, they become your character
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.--Anonymous
- We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean.--Neil Gaiman
- We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.--Abigail Adams (letter to John Adams, Oct. 16, 1774)
- What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself--Mark Twain
- When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.--James Earl Jones
- Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.--Hermann Hes
- A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.--Emily Dickinson ("A Word is Dead")
- Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.--Learned Hand
- Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.--Joan Aiken
- 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
- Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.—Henry Wheeler Shaw
- Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad.--Manly Hall
- Words are the most powerful thing in the universe... Words are containers. They contain faith, or fear, and they produce after their kind.--Charles Capps
- Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.--Jim Rohn
- Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Words may be mere wind, but then so is a tornado.--Lisle de Vaux Matthewman
- Words may show a man's wit, but actions his meaning.--Benjamin Franklin
- Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.--John Maynard Keynes
- Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them!--Nathaniel Hawthorne (The American Notebooks)
- Write kind words in marble, insults in sand.--Iranian proverb
- 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.--Anonymous
- The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.--Knut Hamsun
- You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken--unspeakable!--fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse--a little tiny mouse!--of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.--Winston Churchill
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This page last updated April 1, 2017.