Famous Quotes about Words (143 Quotations)

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.

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.

Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

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.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

By words the mind is winged.

Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.

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.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.

Gentle words, quiet words, are after all the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more compelling, more prevailing.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Good words are worth a thousand pictures.

Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs.

He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

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.

I don't give a damn for man that can spell a word only one way.