One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.

—James Earl Jones

Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.

—Learned Hand

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

—John Maynard Keynes

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

By words we learn thoughts, and by thoughts we learn life.

—Jean Baptiste Girard

God wove a web of loveliness, of clouds and stars and birds, but made not anything at all so beautiful as words.

—Anna Hempstead Branch

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?

—Buddha

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter’s sensitivity to light. Much ... of my writing is verbal painting.

—Elizabeth Bowen

I like good strong words that mean something.

—Louisa May Alcott

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

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