A word makes thy fortune sometimes.
If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss
The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, lecture at Columbia University, Mar. 4, 1908
Words are but the bannerets of a great army, a few bits of waving color here and there; thoughts are the main body of the footman that march unseen below.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
Words which enlighten some darken others.
If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
The written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
One mild word ... will quench more heat than a bucket of water.
JOHN THORNTON, Maxims and Directions for Youth
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Spanish Gypsy
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
The proof of words are sometimes the effect of them on others; words are not proofs without effect.
Fair words never hurt the tongue.
GEORGE CHAPMAN, Eastward Ho
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Word and picture are correlatives which are continually in quest of each other, as is sufficiently evident in the case of metaphors and similes. So from all time what was said or sung inwardly to the ear had to be presented equally to the eye. And so in childish days we see word and picture in continual balance; in the book of the law and in the way of salvation, in the Bible and in the spelling-book. When something was spoken which could not be pictured, and something pictured which could not be spoken, all went well; but mistakes were often made, and a word was used instead of a picture; and thence arose those monsters of symbolical mysticism, which are doubly an evil.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
Words are in this respect like water, that they often take their taste, flavour, and character, from the mouth out of which they proceed, as the water from the channel through which it flows.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
The words of God are deeds.
If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH, Conversations with God
It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
You can stroke people with words.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Notebooks
- 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"
Words frequently surrender power to the opposer.
- I sit and say nothing for fear
- My words will turn to stone
- And though they are sincere,
- They will become a prison of their own.
GARRISON KEILLOR, Pilgrims
- 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
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
JOHN ADAMS, letter to J. H. Tiffany, Mar. 31, 1819
The sharpest sword is a word spoken in wrath.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA, The Gospel of Buddha
