Words of love, are works of love.
—William R. Alger
An enormous conflict between words and deeds is prevalent today: everyone talks about freedom, democracy, justice, human rights, about peace and saving the world from nuclear apocalypse; and at the same time, everyone, more or less, consciously or unconsciously, serves those values and ideals only to the extent necessary to serve himself and his "worldly" interests, personal interests, group interests, power interests, property interests, and state or great-power interests.… So the power structures apparently have no other choice than to sink deeper into this vicious maelstrom, and contemporary people apparently have no other choice than to wait around until the final inhibition drops away. But who should begin? Who should break this vicious circle? Responsibility cannot be preached but only borne, and the only possible place to begin is with oneself.
—Vaclav Havel
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
—Roland Barthes
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
—Willa Cather
The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire.
—Émile de Girardin
Think of a word as a pendulum instead of a fixed entity. A word can sweep by your ear and by its very sound suggest hidden meanings, preconscious associations. Listen to these words: blood, tranquil, democracy. You know what they mean literally but you have associations with those words that are cultural, as well as your own personal associations.
—Rita Mae Brown
Words are loaded pistols.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
You do not write your life with words. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.
—Patrick Ness in A Monster Calls
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
—Henry David Thoreau
Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson
A picture is a poem without words.
—Horace
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
It was a world full of feelings that I didn't have words for yet.
—Ava Dellaira in Love Letters to the Dead
So the lover must struggle for words.
—T. S. Eliot
Avoid safety. The very word has a mean sound.
—Constance Wagner