Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbors, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.
Samuel Butler – Words
A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
Words – Edmund Burke
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
George Eliot – Words
The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
Henry David Thoreau – Truth, Word
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
Henry David Thoreau – Writing, Word
We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life–to rested language or language under surveillance–to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.
Gaston Bachelard – Words, Reverie
The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.
Gaston Bachelard – Spirituality, Words
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
Gaston Bachelard – Words, Dream, Writing
You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword
Samuel Johnson – Silence, Word
He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
Oscar Wilde – Words
Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.
Sigmund Freud – Words
When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.
Goethe – Idea, Word
A word spoken is a terrible thing when it suddenly utters what the heart has long allowed.
Goethe – Word
Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.
Benjamin Franklin – Words, Action
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…
