We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
Words of love, are works of love.
When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
By words the mind is winged.
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
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.
The words of the world want to make sentences.
Words are all we have.
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
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.
The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.
— Bible
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.
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.
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.
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
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.
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
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.
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.
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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.
Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the animals don't understand us.
I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.
Eating words has never given me indigestion.
Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men.
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.
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.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
A word carries far -- very far -- deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
I have never been hurt by what I have not said.
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.
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.
A word is dead when it is said. Some say. I say it just, begins to live that day.
I've been asked to say a couple of words about my husband, Fang. How about short and cheap?
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.
The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.
Words represent your intellect. The sound, gesture and movement represent your feelings.
Gentle words, quiet words, are after all the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more compelling, more prevailing.
I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.
Every spoken word arouses our self-will.
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one.
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.
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.
We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.
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?
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.
— Hays, Ed
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
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.
Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools.
Words are the money of fools.
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.
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.
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.
Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs.
Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.
Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.
A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.
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.
Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.
All words are part true and part false.
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
What do you call a boomerang that doesn't work? A stick!
The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.
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.
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.
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.
Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
Words can be like baseball bats when used maliciously.
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.
The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts.
On a single winged word hath hung the destiny of nations.
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.
A word from the mouth is like a stone from a sling.
A wise man hears one word and understands two.
Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
A single word often betrays a great design.
There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.
Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.
Words are the small change of thought.
Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.
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.
What you keep by you, you may change and mend but words, once spoken, can never be recalled.
A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
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.
Words are loaded pistols.
A word too much always defeats its purpose.
It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.
Nothing can throw thee into the infernal abyss so much as this detested word -- heed well! -- this mine and thine.
It is with words as with sunbeams -- the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.
The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
I don't give a damn for man that can spell a word only one way.
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.
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.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
When I look at you, the wheels of time stand still vs. Your face could stop a clock
The written word can be erased -- not so with the spoken word.
When thoughts fails of words, they find imagination waiting at their elbow to teach a new language without words.
Why do social workers use five-syllable words when dealing with juvenile delinquents?
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.
You can stroke people with words.
Good words are worth a thousand pictures.
One thing you can give and still keep is your word.
It is with a word as with an arrow -- once let it loose and it does not return.
Please God, make my words today sweet and tender, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.
Political correctness is simply a speed bump in the traffic of truth, free thought and speech.
The 500 most commonly used words have an average of 28 meanings each.
The supply of words in the world market is plentiful but the demand is falling. Let deeds follow words now.
Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.
One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
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.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
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.
There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.