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A wise man hears one word and understands two.
-Yiddish Proverb
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If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.
-Chinese Proverb
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A word from the mouth is like a stone from a sling.
-Proverb
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We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
-Abigail Adams
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No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious.
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 after Adam's death
-Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
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Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
-John Adams
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Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.
-Joseph Addison
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Words of love, are works of love.
-William R. Alger
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When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
-Gracie Allen
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If I where to describe myself in one word, a new word should be made.
-Anonymous
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Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
-Hannah Arendt
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By words the mind is winged.
-Aristophanes
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A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
-Burt Bacharach
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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.
-Gaston Bachelard
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The words of the world want to make sentences.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Words are all we have.
-Samuel Beckett
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All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why --but the editorialists forget it --terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.
-John Berger
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He dropped pejoratives like subliminal seasoning.
-Jim Bishop
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There are words which sever hearts more than sharp swords; there are words the point of which sting the heart through the course of a whole life.
-Frederika Bremer
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At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.
-Buddha
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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.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
-William S. Burroughs
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A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
-Robert Burton
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Books about Words
