Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Words.
She had faith in words, believing in their ability to carry inexpressible messages, trusting that what cannot be said can somehow be borne aloft by what can be said. She was right.
Frank Conroy, foreword to Autobi
The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.
Anatole France
Prose, words in their best order. Poetry, the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather
I've been asked to say a couple of words about my husband, Fang. How about short and cheap?
Phyllis Diller
A wise man hears one word and understands two.
Yiddish Proverb
Words are the small change of thought.
Jules Renard
Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.
There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;No wisdom but in submission to the gods.Big words are always punished,And proud men in old age learn to be wise.
Sophocles, Antigone, 442
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious.won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 after Adam's death
Henry Adams, The Education of He
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
Herbert Spencer
Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?
G. K. Chesterton
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, American No
Kind words may be short... but their echoes are endless.
Mother Theresa
Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.
Joseph Addison
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
Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.
Oscar Wilde
One of the grat tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the and the , represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
George Eliot