WORDS QUOTES XI

quotations about words

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.

SIGMUND FREUD

attributed, The Educator's Book of Quotes

Tags: Sigmund Freud


Actions speak louder than words, because as much as I hate to admit it, words don't have to mean anything if you don't want them to. Lying is easy.

ISABEL DRUKKER

"Sticks and stones", Campus Times, April 2, 2017


You wait for nothing
if not for the word
that will burst from the deep
like a fruit among branches.

CESARE PAVESE

"Earth and Death"

Tags: Cesare Pavese


A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

MARK TWAIN

"Essay on William Dean Howells"

Tags: Mark Twain


The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.

JACK LONDON

The Star Rover

Tags: Jack London


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

JOHN ADAMS

letter to J. H. Tiffany, March 31, 1819

Tags: John Adams


Our words are such powerful tools, tools that shape divine ideas into reality.

BARBARA WALSH

"Choosing our words wisely for encouragement", Deming Headlight, January 28, 2016


A word in season is most precious.

AESOP

"The Swan and the Goose", Aesop's Fables


A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion

Tags: Stefan Zweig


The sharpest sword is a word spoken in wrath.

GAUTAMA BUDDHA

The Gospel of Buddha

Tags: Buddha


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

GEORGE ELIOT

The Spanish Gypsy


Our words are always formative ... what we think and constantly affirm becomes our reality.

BARBARA WALSH

"Choosing our words wisely for encouragement", Deming Headlight, January 28, 2016


When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it and it digs a path you follow.

ANNIE DILLARD

The Writing Life


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, 1848

Tags: Nathaniel Hawthorne


Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.

THOMAS HOBBES

Leviathan

Tags: Thomas Hobbes


Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

letter to Kirill Nabokov, c. 1930

Tags: Vladimir Nabokov


The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

GEORGE ORWELL

The Lion and the Unicorn

Tags: George Orwell


Our sense that words are static things sitting in the dictionary with a meaning -- or even meanings -- that sit still is artificial. Rather, a word is a process, always on its way to becoming a different one.

JOHN H. MCWHORTER

"Not so lost in translation: How are words related?", The Christian Science Monitor, February 3, 2016


Words are naught but wind, and the fairest promises like dreams that take flight with the morning.

ÉDOUARD RENÉ DE LABOULAYE

Abdallah

Tags: Édouard René de Laboulaye


Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Philosophy

Tags: Bertrand Russell