quotations about words
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
GEORGE ORWELL
The Lion and the Unicorn
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
What a children's earliest words are also depends on the age at which they start talking -- a late talker who is already mobile will learn words for the toys and objects that they find around them, while early talkers may learn more conversational words, for example hello, bye bye, or thank you.
ELENA LIEVEN & CAROLINE ROWLAND
"Should children understand at least 25 words by the time they are 2-years-old?", The Independent, January 14, 2016
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The Olive Tree
Words are naught but wind, and the fairest promises like dreams that take flight with the morning.
ÉDOUARD RENÉ DE LABOULAYE
Abdallah
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
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"
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, March 31, 1819
Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"After Long Silence"
You wait for nothing
if not for the word
that will burst from the deep
like a fruit among branches.
CESARE PAVESE
"Earth and Death"
Our words are such powerful tools, tools that shape divine ideas into reality.
BARBARA WALSH
"Choosing our words wisely for encouragement", Deming Headlight, January 28, 2016
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
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
TOM ROBBINS
interview, Reality Sandwich
Wicked words are the prelude to wicked deeds.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Pamela
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
Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
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
The word was -- civilization!
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
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