Word Quotes | Beyond Motive

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Word Quotes

"How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words."

Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian Dramatist

5

"We die in proportion to the words we fling around us."

Emile M. Cioran, Romanian Philosopher

4

"Word - that invisible dagger."

Emile M. Cioran, Romanian Philosopher

4

"I don't understand the word hunk."

Goran Visnjic, Croatian Actor

4

"I'd like to get the word out there, the word has to be spread."

Chita Rivera, Puerto Rican Actress

3

"Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves."

Johann G. Hamann, German Philosopher

3

"If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched."

Erika Slezak, American Actress

1

"What's another word for Thesaurus?"

Steven Wright, American Comedian

1

"I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately."

Peter Falk, American Actor

"But words - words are not enough!"

Klaus Kinski, German Actor

"For Closer, we've had five weeks. You go into every single word because it's very, very concentrated dialogue."

Anna Friel, English Actress

"What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you."

Erykah Badu, American Musician

Word, Words, Writers, Wrong

"Better break your word than do worse in keeping it."

Thomas Fuller, English Clergyman

"Use not big words for naught."

L. M. Heroux, American Author

"I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels."

John Calvin, French Theologian

"Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins."

Jules Renard, French Dramatist

"Once someone asked me three words that best describe me and I said 'Loud, Louder, and Loudest."

Anastacia, American Musician

"If I told you the words, you wouldn't believe them anyway."

Richard Berry, American Musician

"When you are there, you are. With words, you aren't."

Klaus Kinski, German Actor

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'"

Lewis Carroll, English Author

"Using the word weird implies that there is a norm."

Robyn Hitchcock, English Musician

"I learned that you don't have to be all over the place, that you can be subtle and you can say what you say. The words that you put together can be just as hilarious as falling all over the place or doing something."

Mike Epps, American Comedian

"I would be a liar if I said it wouldn't be lovely and soothing - that's the word - to have a hit single or a hit album."

Mel Torme, American Musician

"I'm the only instrument that's got the words, so I've got to be able to get that across."

Rosemary Clooney, American Musician

"I live like a Hottentot. I cannot exchange one sensible word with anyone."

Gustav Mahler, Austrian Composer

"Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages."

Benjamin Whorf, American Scientist

"I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words."

Fred Frith, English Composer

"Cancelled isn't a bad word because it happens everyday."

Wayne Brady, American Comedian

"Everything that Traffic ever did, I'd give Steve a complete lyric, titled, written out with the verse, the bridge, the shape and rhyme and then Steve had to figure out how the meter of the words would fit musically."

Jim Capaldi, British Musician

"'Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad."

David R. Brower, American Environmentalist

"Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors."

Leonard Bernstein, American Composer

"It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word."

Peter Shaffer, English Playwright

"I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word."

David Mamet, American Dramatist

"A million words were going through my head and honestly I didn't say one of them. I wanted to let it sit, simmer, you know I wanted to soak it all in - the moment was amazing."

Stefano Langone, American Musician

"When I was writing, I genuinely believed each word was my own."

Kaavya Viswanathan, American Author

"I can hear you and I can watch your mouth move, and then I put together the sounds and the visual image, and I can understand the words as I integrate the two signals."

Marlee Matlin, American Actress

"Be aware that the more often a child hears the word no, the greater his need to say no himself."

Cathy Rindner Tempelsman, American Author

"The paper burns, but the words fly away."

Ben Joseph Akiba, American Clergyman

"All Bridget Jones did was give us a word for it - singleton - which was the worst possible thing."

Daisy Donovan, British Actress

"Words are just words."

Luther Campbell, American Musician

"Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition."

Learned Hand, American Judge

"Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!"

Steve Martin, American Comedian

"A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures."

Ben Shneiderman, American Scientist

Word, Words, Worth

"The best contraceptive is the word no - repeated frequently."

Margaret Smith, American Comedian

"Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few."

Pythagoras, Greek Mathematician

"That was the problem with the 'celibate' word because they don't consider for a moment that you'd rather not be, but you just are. I was never a sexual person."

Steven Morrissey, English Musician

"Bob Dylan has a way with words that simply blows me away. When he forgets his lyrics he just makes up new ones on the spot, that is what I called talented!"

Gavin Rossdale, British Musician

"In one word, this ideal is that you are divine."

Swami Vivekananda, Indian Clergyman

"In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand."

Kenneth Branagh, Irish Actor

"And it should be the law: If you use the word "paradigm" without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions."

David Jones, American Artist

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