Always be aware that there is a brief magical moment in every relationship when the right statement will change a life forever.
~ Ed Anderson and John E. Peterson, in Loving Words Every Child Needs To Hear (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998).

By words the mind is excited and the spirit elated.
~ Aristophanes

A man’s command of the language is most important. Next to kissing, it’s the most exciting form of communication mankind has evolved.
~ Oren Arnold

Men believe that a society is disintegrating when it can no longer be pictured in familiar terms. Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on.
~ Thurman Arnold

A word after a word after a word is power.
~ Margaret Atwood

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
~ Jane Austen

“Plain English”–everybody loves it, demands it–from the other fellow.
~ Jacques Barzun

Words are as vital to life as food and drink and sex, but on the whole we don’t show as much interest in language as we do in the other–more obvious–pleasures.
~ Gyles Brandreth

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
~Gerald Brenan

Standard English is a convenient abstraction, like the average man.
~ G. L. Brook

Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.
~ Kenneth Burke

Be not a slave of words.
~ Thomas Carlyle

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean–nothing more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” siad Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master–that’s all.”
~ Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass

The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understanding to judge.
~ Lord Chesterfield

Words have power. We must set out to harness that power with a clear awareness that words can both tear down and build up. They are much like a sharp knife that in the hands of a surgeon can heal, but in the hands of a careless child can kill. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)
~ Larry Crabb, in Encouragement: The Key To Caring

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
~ Thomas Jefferson

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of demons.
~ Aldous Huxley

We see words that blow like leaves in the winds of autumn–golden words, bronze words, words that catch the light like opals. We learn that words have an independent life of their own, grown out of echoes and connotations and associations. We see that words are tactile; we find rough words, smooth words, words with splintered edges, words to shout or whisper with, words that caress, words that strike.
~ James J. Kilpatrick

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling.

True eloquence consists of saying all that should be, not all that could be, said.
~ La Rochefoucauld

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
~ Alexander Pope

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
~ Chinese Proverb

One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese Proverb

One should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.
~ Quintillian

Time had no special significance for a certain juvenile and incorrigible fisher of words who thought nothing of fishing for two weeks to catch a stanza, or even a line, that he would not throw back into a squirming sea of language where there was every word but the one he wanted. There were strange and iridescent and impossible words that would seize the bait and swallow the hook and all but drag the excited angler in after them, but lie that famous catch of Hiawatha’s, they were generally not the fish he wanted. he wanted fish that were smooth and shining and subtle, and very much alive, and not too strange, and presently, after long patience and many rejections, they began to bite.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

Words are a heavy thing…they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn’t fly.
~ Sy Rosen and Christian Williams, in Northern Exposure, On Your Own

If . . . you are willing to think about how we communicate, and consider the words and the forms of grammar, then you are automatically a member of the Authority, entitled to a ring and a secret handshake and the thrill of membership. A word of warning: If you get hooked on the study of the language, you are in that sorority, or fraternity, for life.
~ William Safire

Every utterance is an event, and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view, therefore, is that no word ever means the same thing twice.
~ Louis B. Saloman

Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.
~ May Sarton

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them a the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
~ Dorothy Sayers, in The Lost Tools of Learning

Syllables govern the world.
~ John Selden

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
~ William Shakespeare

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech; that your native tongue is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ George Bernard Shaw

The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.
~ Florence Shinn

Words too are known by the company they keep.
~ Joseph Shipley

When it comes to learning good English, most people are prone to be supine.
~ John Simon

It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
~ Robert Southey

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
~ Adlai Stevenson

Language was given to conceal men’s thoughts.
~ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

A word to the wise is sufficient.
~ Terence

One always refers to language as a tool; but after playing around with more years that there legitimately are, i tell you that it is also, in a vulgar phrase, something else. More precious than pearls at any price, it is a marvelous toy, a plaything of the mind.
~ Joe D. Thomas

English is a language of marvelous qualities. I like to see it properly used just a one likes to see a shirt properly washed and a dinner table properly set.
~ Barbara Tuchman

A new word is like a wild animal you have caught. You must learn its ways and break it before you can use it.
~ H. G. Wells

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
~ Steven Wright