quotations about words
The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
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
The sharpest sword is a word spoken in wrath.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
The Gospel of Buddha
Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"After Long Silence"
Oaths are but words, and words but wind.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Hudibras
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
And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.
ANTHONY BURGESS
Enderby Outside
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
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
Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
VOLTAIRE
Dialogue
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together; and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
T. S. ELIOT
Ash-Wednesday
We allow words to obscure the interpretation of the deeper meaning.
STEPHEN YOUNG
preface, Micro Messaging: Why Great Leadership is Beyond Words
I like good strong words that mean something.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy.
PABLO NERUDA
"So That You Will Hear Me"
If words suffice not, blows must follow.
AESOP
"The Farmer and the Cranes", Aesop's Fables
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The Olive Tree
Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Cave
Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
EUGENE IONESCO
Fragments of a Journal