At the summit of the distant sky
Is the word, enveloping everything.
-Rig Veda
Against the Word the unstilled
world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.
-T. S. Eliot
Words are not just wind.
Words have something to say.
-Zhuangzi
The first word Ah,
blossomed into all others.
Each of them is true.
-Kukei
We are in love with the word.
-Norman Mailer
We fall asleep on words
we wake among words
-Zbigniew Herbert
I loved words.
I used to lie awake at night when I was a child
and say words,
and I used to picture them as waterfalls of light.
-Audre Lorde
Words are grouped around a picture
like men around a table or a log fire.
-Edmond Jabes
Words should be an intense pleasure,
just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
-Evelyn Waugh
Words fascinate me.
For me, browsing in a dictionary
is being like turned loose in a bank.
-Eddie Cantor
What do you read, my lord?
Words, words, words.
-William Shakespeare
"Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"
"So easy that, to tell you the truth,
I am seldom perfectly sober."
-Dorothy Sayers
Man does not live by words alone,
despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
-Adlai Stevenson
I am not yet so lost in lexicography,
as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth.
-Samuel Johnson
They are children of many men,
our words.
-George Serefis
Words often have the age of those who chose them.
-Edmond Jabes
A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere,
unless you grasp its historical significance.
-Stefan Zweig
There are worlds that are in full flower, in full vigor,
words that the past has not exhausted,
whose beauty the ancients did not fully recognize,
words that are the mysterious jewels of a language.
-Gaston Bachelard
Words are but symbols
for the relations of things to one another and to us;
nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.
-Friedrich von Nietzsche
Words are motes of thought
and nothing more.
-Philip James Bailey
Words are the fog one has to see through.
-Zen Saying
Words, as is well known,
are the great foes of reality.
-Joseph Conrad
Words are the small change of thought.
-Jules Renard
All our words are but crumbs
that fall down from the feast of the mind.
-Kahlil Gibran
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.
Little audible links, they are,
chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
-Theodore Dreiser
How strangely do we diminish a thing
as soon as we try to express it in words.
-Maurice Maeterlinck
So difficult it is to show
the various meanings and imperfections of words
when we have nothing else but words to do it with.
-John Locke
The words can only be helped by a word.
-Edmond Jabes
There are not words enough in all of Shakespeare
to express the merest fraction of man's experience in an hour.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
Words mean more than what is set down on paper.
It takes the human voice to infuse them
with shades of deeper meaning.
-Maya Angelou
Words form the thread
on which we string our experiences.
-Aldous Huxley
All words are pegs to hang ideas on. -Henry Ward Beecher
My words are little jars
For you to take and put upon a shelf.
-Amy Lowell
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged;
it is the skin of a living thought,
and may vary greatly in color and content
according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
Words have weight, sound and appearance.
-W. Somerset Maugham
Words are like planets,
each with its own gravitational pull.
-Kenneth Burke
Every word is an adamantine shell
which encloses a great explosive force.
-Nikos Kazantzakis
The word can produce the effect
of earth, water, fire, air or ether.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
The word lifts order out of chaos.
-Northrope Fry
Uttering a word is like striking a note
on the keyboard of the imagination.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
A new word is like a fresh seed
sown on the ground of the discussion.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
The faster the word sticks to the thought,
the more beautiful is the effect.
-Gustave Flaubert
Our words must seem to be inevitable.
-William Butler Yeats
Let a word mature inside yourself.
Withhold the unripened thought.
-Yunus Emre
One day I will find the right words,
and they will be simple.
-Jack Kerouac
Words, when well chosen,
have so great a force in them
that a description often gives us more lively ideas
than the sight of the things themselves.
-Joseph Addison
A powerful agent is the right word.
Whenever we come across one of those intensely right words...
the resulting effect is physical and well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
-Mark Twain
How forcible are right words!
-The Bible
Good words are worth much,
and cost little.
-George Herbert
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. -Mark Twain
The wrong word
is like a lie jammed inside the story.
-Grace Paley
Broadly speaking,
the short words are best,
and the old words best of all.
-Winston Churchill
One should use common words
to say uncommon things.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
Before employing a fine word,
make a place for it.
-Joseph Joubert
A word too much
always defeats its purpose.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
Words, like eyeglasses,
blur everything they don't make more clear.
-Joseph Joubert
Nothing is more human than substituting
the quantity of words and
actions for their character.
But using imprecise words is very similar
to using lots of words,
for the more imprecise a word is, the greater
the area it covers.
-Robert Musil
Words have no power
unless they are spoken in the feeling
of the spirit of that truth
that the words are intended to convey.
-Christian Larson
If words don't have vibration behind them,
and a real feeling behind them,
then they are just words.
-Charlotte Rampling
The words were living things to her.
She sensed them bestriding the air
and charging the room with strong colors.
-Paule Marshall
A Word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die.
-Emily Dickinson
The word is a sign or symbol
of the impressions or affections of the soul.
-Aristotle
Words represent your intellect.
The sound, gesture and movement represent your feelings.
-Patricia Fripp
In words one sees the state of mind
and character and disposition of the speaker.
-Plutarch
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
-Samuel Beckett
Words, like Nature,
half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
-Alfred Tennyson
When I choose a word,
it means precisely what I want it to mean,
neither more nor less.
-Lewis Carroll
In the world of words,
the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
-Wallace Stevens
Words are the supreme objects.
They are minded things.
-William Gass
Words are wind.
-George R. R. Martin
Pronounced, the word flies;
written, it swims.
-Edmond Jabes
By words the mind is winged.
-Aristophanes
Words have no wings
but they can fly a thousand miles.
-Korean Proverb
There are words
which have never touched ground.
-Edmond Jabes
Our words have wings,
but fly not where we would.
-George Eliot
Once a word has been allowed to escape,
it cannot be recalled.
-Horace
Water and words -
Easy to pour
Impossible to recover.
-Chinese Proverb
Words, once they are printed,
have a life of their own.
-Carol Burnett
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
-George Gordon Noel Byron
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
-Emily Dickinson
Words are also action,
and actions are a kind of words.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Words are a form of action,
capable of influencing change.
Their articulation represents
a complete, lived experience.
-Ingrid Bengis
Words can sometimes,
in moments of grace,
attain the quality of deeds.
-Elie Wiesel
There are words which are worth as much
as the best actions,
for they contain the germ of them all.
-Anne Swetchine
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects,
and once engraved in a child's mind,
they are not easily eradicated.
-May Sarton
Every word carries a vibration
that sent out, comes back.
-Cheryl Canfield
Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. -Toni Cade Bambara
Words are the language we speak
that results in the creation of the reality we come to know.
-Don Miguel Ruiz
Words are the creators of worlds,
and these worlds may remain in existence for a very long time.
You cannot know how long the effects of a word will last.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
With words we govern men.
-Benjamin Disraeli
One word keeps another in the sheath.
-George Herbert
The true word leads; the untrue misleads. -Franz Kafka
If words come out of the heart
They will enter the heart.
But if they come from the tongue
They will not pass beyond the ears.
-Al Suhrawandi
You may choose your word like a connoisseur,
And polish it up with art,
But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays,
Is the word that comes from the heart.
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Of course, not everything is unsayable in words,
only the living truth.
-Eugène Ionesco
The word does not come alone.
-Dogon Saying
The words of the world
want to make sentences.
-Gaston Bachelard
A word after a word after a word is power.
-Margaret Atwood
There's a great power in words,
if you don't hitch too many of them together.
-Josh Billings
A very great part of the mischiefs
that vex this world arises from words.
-Edmund Burke
Words which enlighten some
darken others.
-Edward Counsel
Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
-Ayn Rand
Words are angels, are powers,
which have invisible power over us.
They are personal presences, which have whole mythologies...
and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects.
-James Hillman
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are,
as standing in a dictionary,
how potent for good and evil they become,
in the hands of one who knows how to combine them!
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
The more articulate one is,
the more dangerous words become.
-May Sarton
The words of some men
are thrown forcibly against you,
and adhere like burrs.
-Henry David Thoreau
It is with words as with sunbeams -
the more they are condensed,
the deeper they burn.
-Robert Southey
I have my amulets: words.
-Henri Bosco
Words are, of course,
the most powerful drug used by mankind.
-Rudyard Kipling
Words are potent weapons
for all causes, good or bad.
-Manly Hall
Words have no power to impress the mind
without the exquisite horror of their reality.
-Edgar Allan Poe
Word - that invisible dagger.
-Emile Cioran
The word can be a bullet
or a hole to plant a seed.
-Malachi Smith
Our words should not aim to please,
but to help.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Words carry colors and sounds into the flesh.
-Anais Nin
You can stroke people with words.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
Words make love with one another.
-Andre Breton
Words make another place,
a place to escape to with your spirit alone.
-Robert MacNeil
The word is my fourth dimension.
-Clarice Lispector
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
-T. S. Eliot
Words stand between silence and silence:
between the silence of things
and the silence of our own being.
-Thomas Merton
The more perfect the understanding between men,
the less need of words.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
To use many words to communicate few thoughts
is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity.
To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
-Alexander Pope
A word to the wise is sufficient.
-Terence
Speak but one word to me.
-William Morris
Hold firmly to your word.
-Maimonides
Your word is your wand.
-Florence Scovel Shinn
Words are cups.
Their worth depends upon the spirit invested in them.
-Alan Cohen
Words are but ghosts unless they speak the heart.
-Aurobindo Ghose
Words which do not give the light of Christ
increase the darkness.
-Mother Teresa
They can be a great help - words.
They can become the spirit's hands and lift and caress you.
-Meister Eckhart
Words pregnant with celestial fire.
-William Cowper
They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart
what light can do for a field.
-Saint John of the Cross
The word must become flesh.
That's the world's secret.
-Rainer Marie Rilke
Pleasant words are as a honeycomb,
sweet to the soul, and health to the bones. -The Bible
The beauty of the word is a splendour of truth.
A true word in always beautiful, a beautiful word is always true.
-Eliphas Levi
The words that enlighten our soul
are more precious than jewels.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
There are divine things more beautiful
than words can tell.
-Walt Whitman
We are fascinated by the words
but where we meet
is in the silence behind them.
-Richard Alpert "Ram Dass"
Beyond words and in them, too:
the mystery, the silence of consciousness.
-Dick Holmes
Words are used to express meaning;
when you understand the meaning,
you can forget about words.
-Chuang-tzu
When the fish are caught
the trap is forgotten.
When the ideas are grasped,
the words are forgotten.
-Zhuangzi
Whence can I find a man
who has forgotten words
so that I can have a word with him?
-Chuang-tzu
