I like good strong words that mean something.

—Louisa May Alcott

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

—Nelson Mandela

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man’s principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man’s other tools would be worthless.

—Lewis Mumford

A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say./ I say it just / Begins to live / That day.

—Emily Dickinson

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

—John Maynard Keynes

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

Write kind words in marble, insults in sand.

—Iranian proverb

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

—Benjamin Franklin

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

— Steven Wright

There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.

—Josh Billings

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams — the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

—Robert Southey

Be careful of the words you say, / Keep them short and sweet. / You never know, from day to day, / Which ones you’ll have to eat.

—Anonymous