Words Quotes

Words are the counters of wise man, and the money of fools.

Hobbes.

Words should be employed as the means, not as the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

Sir J.Reynolds.

Volatility of words is carelessness in actions;  words are the wings of actions.

Lavater.

The knowledge of word is the gate of scholarship.

Wilson.

What you keep by you, you may change and mend; but words, once spoken, can never be recalled.

Roscommon.

Words are both better and worse than thoughts; they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they star them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin.

Tryon Edwards.

No man has a prosperity so high or firm, but that two or three words can dishearten it; and there is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress.

Emerson.

Not in books only, nor yet in oral discourse, but often also in words there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination laid up, from which lessons of infinite worth may be derived.

Whately.

Words are the clothes that thoughts wear only the clothes.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) English author.

Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make clearer.

Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) French essayist and moralist.

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) English economist.

“ 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.”

Would you repeat that again, sir, for it soun’s sae sonorous that the words droon the ideas?

John Wilson (1785-1854) Scottish philosopher

One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs consent fertilization or it will die.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) British novelist.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) British author.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and arousing of emotions, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) British scientist.

Seets thou a man that is hasty in his words? There is more hope of a fool than of him.

Solomon.

I would rather speak the truth to ten men than blandishments and lying to a million. Try it, ye who think there is nothing in it; try what it is to speak with God behind you to speak so as to be only the arrow in the bow which the almighty draws.

H.W.Beecher.

Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

Pope.

Bad words are as influential as the plague and the pestilence. They have wrought more evil than battle, murder, and sudden death. They creep through the ear into the heart, call up all its bad passions, and tempt it to break God’s commandments. A few bad words got into the ear of the mother of mankind, and they led her on to eat the forbidden fruit, and thus to bring death into the world.

G. Mogridge.

A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill requires only our silence, which costs us nothing.

Tillotoson.

You may tame the wild beast; the conflagration of the forest will cease when all the timber and the dry wood are consumed; but you cannot arrest the progress of that cruel world which you uttered carelessly yesterday or this morning.

F.W.Roberston.

When words are scare they are seldom spent in vain.

Shakespeare.