Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.

Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

Use the right word, not its second cousin.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

I like people who are minimalist with their words. Jack Nicholson thinks a lot then says something, and it's always spot on. Nelson Mandela is the same.

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

Minimalism has a connotation of being reductive, and not in the best way. 'Brevetist' is a better term. I'm trying to be as concise as possible and still getting across to the reader. When information is delivered in that way, it is very satisfying to me.

A good discourse is that from which nothing can be retrenched without cutting into the quick.

Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

We need to become more acutely conscious that words matter. None of us would deny that ideas and opinions matter, but we can sometimes be careless about how we express them. The words we choose to advance an idea, opinion, or point of view have a huge impact on how people react and respond to that view. When we use hyperbole, we increase the chances of being misunderstood and of promoting equally exaggerated counter-reactions, especially when people are reacting almost instantaneously.

There are three types of words: words we all know, words we should know, and words nobody knows. Don't use the third category.

If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

To reason with poorly chosen words is like using a pair of scales with inaccurate weights.

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?

The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word.

Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.

Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.

Few things concentrate the mind more efficiently than the necessity of saying what you mean. It brings you face to face with what you are talking about, what you are actually proposing. It gets you away from the catch phrases that not merely substitute for thought but preclude it.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.