words quotes
Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
He still had his glorious sense of words drawn from the special reservoir from which Lincoln also drew, fed by Shakespeare and thoseTudor critics who wrote the first Prayer Book of Edward VI and their Jacobean successors who translated the Bible.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slipperyand thought is viscous.
In youth open your mind, And let all learning in; Words the head does not shape Are worthless, out and in. Words wit has not salted,No nearer the heart than the lip, Are nothing more than wind, A puppy's insolent yelp.
Curled minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words!
Vain matter is worse than vain words.
In things that are tender and unpleasing, it isgood to break the ice by some whose words are of less weight, and to reserve the more weighty voice to come in as by chance.
One picture is worth ten thousand words.
I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me.
Therefore doth Job open his mouth in vain; he multiplieth words without knowledge.
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
The entrance of thy wordsgiveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple.
A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.
Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty toutterany thing before God: for God isinheaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.
Behold,Ihave put my wordsinthy mouth. See,Ihavethis day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.
For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel; Not many people of a strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not understand. Surely, had I sent thee to them, they would have hearkened unto thee.
And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as thestarsforeverand ever.Butthou,ODaniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
Asthe climbing up a sandy way isto the feet of the aged, so is a wife full of words to a quiet man.
Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words; be as one that knoweth and yet holdeth his tongue.
And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, whenye departoutofthat house orcity, shake off the dust of your feet.
Verily I say unto you. Thisgeneration shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.
It isthespiritthat quickeneth; thefleshprofitethnothing: the words that I speak unto you, theyare spirit, and they are life.
Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me.
And God shall wipe awayall tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, norcrying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said,Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
Come like a light in the white mackerel sky, come like a daytime comet with a long unnebulous train of words, Bismarck from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying.
Si j'e cris quatre mots, j'en effacerai trois. If I write four words, I strike out three of them.
Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.
The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handywork.One day telleth another: and one night certifieth another. There is neither speech nor language: but their voices are heard among them. Their sound isgone out into all lands: and their words into the ends of the world.
Such a fatigue of adjectives, a drone of alliterations, a huffing of hyphenated words hurdling the meter like tired horses. Such a faded upholstery of tears, stars, bells, bones, flood and blooda thud of consonants in tongue, night, dark, dust, seed, wound and wind.
Oaths are but words, and words but wind.
Be not the slave of words.
Poets paint with words, painters speak with works.
Rem tene, verba sequentur. Stick to your subject, and words will follow.
A preoccupation with words for their own sake is fatal to good film-making. It's not what films are for.
This is very truefor my words are my own, and my actions are my Ministers'. See Rochester 692:72.
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
J'ai peu de mots. Mon pe' re qui les avait tous, est parti si pre cipitamment, qu'il n'a pas eu le temps de me les donner. I have few words. My father, who had all of them, left so suddenly that he did not have thetime togive themall to me.
Des mots sont arrache s vivants a' la langue de funte. Words are taken alive from a defunct language.
Prose = words in their best order;poetry = the best words in the best order.
We must use words as theyare used, or stand aside from life.
Some by experience find those words mis-placed: At leisure married, they repent in haste.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
We exchanged many frank words in our respective languages.
To create is first of all to destroythere is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs (whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and
A draftsman of words.
Imagine the Lord talking French! Aside from a few odd wordsin Hebrew,Itook it forgrantedthat God had never spoken anything but the most dignified English.
Now we lament one Who danced on a plume of words, Sang with a fountain's panache, Dazzled like slate roofs in sun After rain, was flighty as birds And alone as a mountain ash. The ribald, inspired urchin Leaning over the lip Of his world, as over a rock pool Or a lucky dip, Found everything brilliant and virgin.
The foreign policy of the noble Earl,Lord Russell, may be summed up in two truly expressive words: meddle and muddle.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulationof words.If youcan control themeaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
'Hope' is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stopsat all
He ate and drank the precious Words, His Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, Nor that his frame was Dust.
Immodest words admit of no defence, For want of decency is want of sense.
A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and seehisideas beginto destroysex in America forever.
A propriety of thoughts and words; or, in other terms, thought and words elegantly adapted to the subject.
Deeds, not words.
The bad poet dwells partly in a world of objects and partly in a world of words, and he never can get them to fit.
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.
My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young.
We used to say that a passage of good style beganwith a fresh, usual word, and continued with fresh, usual words to the end; there was nothing more to it.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
A sentence is a sound in itself on which sounds called words may be strung.
The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.
In the house of words was a table of colors. They offered themselves in great fountains and each poet took the color he needed: lemon yellow or sun yellow, ocean blue or smoke blue, crimson red, blood red, wine red.
Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.
One's complete sentences are attempts, as often as not, to complete an incomplete self with words.
Virginite , mysticisme, me lancolie! Trois mots inconnus, trois maladies nouvelles apporte es par le Christ. Virginity, mysticism, melancholy! Three unknown words, three new illnesses brought by Christ.
In arguing too, the parson owned his skill, For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still; While words of learned length, and thund'ring sound Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around, And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, That one small head could carry all he knew.
Thoughts, that breathe, and words, that burn.
When you don't like something the words come more readily.
Words are the bugles of social change.
The four most dramatic words in the English language: 'Act One, Scene One.'
If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are,'It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be.'
I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain.We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now fora long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and thethings that were glorious had no gloryand the sacrifices were like the stock-yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
I sought out quaint words, and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.
In Geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hithertotobestowonmankind) men begin at settling the significations of their words; whichthey call Definitions.
Summer afternoonsummer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain'or 'train'do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance.It is nothing jointed; it flows. A'river'or a 'stream'are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.
Iamnot yet so lost inlexicographyastoforgetthat words arethe daughters of earth, and thatthings arethesons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but thesigns of ideas: Iwish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.
All my house, But now, steamed like a bath with her thick breath. A lawyer could not have been heard; nor scarce Another woman, such a hail of words She has let fall.
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refined, Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.
Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man.
Words just say what you want them to; they don't know any better.
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Say: 'If theseawere ink for theWords of my Lord, thesea would be spent before the Words of my Lord are spent.'
Where words prevail not, violence prevails; But gold doth more than either of them both.
At its birth, the republic gave voice to three wordsLiberty,Equality,Fraternity! If Europeiswiseand just, each of those words signifies Peace.
Not Eve, whose fault was only too much love, Which made her give this present to her dear, That what she tasted he likewise might prove, Whereby his knowledge might become more clear; He never sought her weakness to reprove With those sharp words which he of God did hear; Yet men will boast of knowledge, which he took From Eve's fair hand, as from a learned book.
A gloten of wordes.
She looks like a million dollars, but she only knows a hundred and twenty words and she's only got two ideas in her head.The other one's hats.
He understoodWalt Whitman, who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary, and Herman Melville who split the atom of the traditional novel in the effort to make whaling a universal metaphor.
All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Life is a cycle, and mime is particularly suitable for showing fluidity, transformation, metamorphosis. Words can keep people apart; mime can be a bridge between them.
What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then? If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters'thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admire' d themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest.
Oh that thou hadst like others been all words, And no performance.
For whatever is truly wonderous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.
The oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arche' d roof in words deceiving.
With high words, that bore Semblance of worth, not substance, gently raised Their fainting courage, and dispelled their fears.
Thus Belial with words clothed in reason's garb Counselled ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth, Not peace.
Salve to thy sores, apt words have power to suage The tumours of a troubl'd mind, And are as Balm to fester'd wounds.
Words spoken on the road are heard by snakes in the grass.
Je vis de bonne soupe, et non de beau langage. It's good food and not fine words that keeps me alive.
He bathes daily in a running tap of words.
The Socialist paperscame out full tothethroat of well- printed matteradmirable and straightforward expositions of the doctrines and practice of Socialism, free from hasteand spiteand hard wordswith a kind of May-day freshness amidst the worryand terror of the moment.
The politician is trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.
Words are beautiful things, but muskets and machine guns are even more beautiful.
I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
Praise to the Holiest in the height, And in the depth be praise; In all His words most wonderful, Most sure in all His ways.
A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweepand reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idiomslike cuttlefish squirting out ink.
In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.
There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit.Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply callisthenics with words.
Instead of using onlycomparativeWords and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the courseto express myself inTerms of Number,Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature.
Deathbed utterances, like suicide notes, are a powerful coinage, stamped byan awareness that words can outlive us.
In Words, as Fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike Fantastic, if too New, or Old; Be not the first by whom the Neware try'd, Nor the last to lay the Old aside.
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.
Sempre que os homens sabidos lhe diziam palavras dif|ceis, ele sa|a logrado. Sobressaltava-se escutando-as. Evidentemente so serviam para encobrir ladroeiras. Mas eram bonitas. Whenever men with book learning used big words in dealing with him, he came out the loser. It startled him just to hear those words.Obviously they were just a cover for robbery. But they sounded nice.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love; I, with no rights in this matter, Neither father nor lover.
Everyone knowsthat thelabel Modern Art no longer has any relation to the words that compose it. To be Modern Art a work need not be either modern nor art; it need not even be a work. A three-thousand-year-old mask from the South Pacific qualifies as Modern and a piece of wood found on a beach becomes Art.
En France particulie' rement, les mots ont plus d'empire que les ide es. In France particularly, words reign over ideas.
Look how you use proud words, When you let proud wordsgo, it is not easy to call them back, They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can't hear you calling look out how you use proud words.
My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says that your life depends on your power to master words.
'Then, gentlemen,'said Redgauntlet, clasping his hands together as the words burst from him,'the cause is lost for ever!'
Seul le rythme provoque le court-circuit poe tique et transmue le cuivre en or, la parole en verbe. Only rhythm brings about a poetic short-circuit and transforms the copper into gold, the words into life.
And, by the incarnation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O,Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
It doth repent me: words are quick and vain: Grief for a while is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futuritycastsuponthepresent; thewordswhichexpress what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
What be the fruits of speaking art? What grows by the words?
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, 'Fool,'said my muse to me; 'look in thy heart, and write.'
Your rhubarb words.
How often misused wordsgenerate misleading thoughts.
My parents kept me from children who were rough Whothrew wordslikestones and who woretornclothes
Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds, With nothing else compounded, carried full, Pure rhetoric of a language without words.
Words of the world are the life of the world.
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Th'artillery of words.
Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of style.
'Libertas et natale solum': Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em.
For words divide and rend; But silence is most noble till the end.
I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; The Princess For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
To love one maiden only, cleave to her, And worship her by years of noble deeds, Until they won her; for indeed I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid, Not only to keep down the base in man, But teach high thought, and aimable words And courtliness, and the desire of fame, And love of truth, and all that makes man.
Werther had a love for Charlotte Such as words could never utter; Would you know how first he met her? She was cutting bread and butter.
Ifell inlovethat istheonlyexpression Icanthinkofat once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and gain, which they appear to enjoy.
How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.
But we live like our names and you would have to be colonial to know the difference, to know the pain of history words contain.
Words should be an intense pleasure, just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
One forgets words as one forgets names.One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
A mere tale of a tub, my words are idle.
People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms.
Visionary power Attends the motions of the viewless winds, Embodied in the mystery of words.
Dance, little words, on the end of your string. I can make you do most anything I want to. I can hide anywhere and watch you say the things I would never dare.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Learn more about words