A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
~ Burt Bacharach

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
~ Gaston Bachelard

The words of the world want to make sentences.
~ Gaston Bachelard

We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
~ Abigail Adams

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
~ Henry Brooks Adams

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
~ John Adams

Words of love, are works of love.
~ William R. Alger

When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
~ Gracie Allen

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
~ Hannah Arendt

By words the mind is winged.
~ Aristophanes

Words are all we have.
~ Samuel Beckett

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why --but the editorialists forget it --terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.
~ John Berger

The wise weigh their words on a scale with gold.
~ Bible

There are words which sever hearts more than sharp swords; there are words the point of which sting the heart through the course of a whole life.
~ Frederika Bremer

Bu'' is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the ''Buts'' that could be said.
~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
~ William S. Burroughs

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
~ Robert Burton

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbors, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.
~ Samuel Butler

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
~ Lord Byron