Words Quotes

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).

Ernest Hemingway

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

Alexis de Tocqueville

[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.

Charles Dickens

Words were weapons, his father had taught him that, and he'd wanted to hurt Clary more than he'd ever wanted to hurt any girl. In fact, he wasn't sure he had ever wanted to hurt a girl before. Usually he just wanted them, and then he wanted them to leave him alone.

Cassandra Clare

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

Speak comfortable words!

William Shakespeare

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

Evelyn Waugh

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Ernest Hemingway

She wished such words unsaid with all her heart

Jane Austen

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

George Orwell

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

Mahatma Gandhi

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Robert Southey

How would your life be different ifYou pretended those around you were deaf to your words? Let today be the dayYou let your actions speak and communicate your feelings and intentions.

Steve Maraboli

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

William Shakespeare

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

John Adams

Words represent your intellect. The sound, gesture and movement represent your feelings.

Patricia Fripp

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Henry Ward Beecher

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

Steven Wright

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.

Ruth Hubbard