These adjective quotes will inspire you. Adjective a word or phrase naming an attribute added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging adjective quotes, adjective sayings, and adjective proverbs.
Best Adjective Quotes
- “A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.” ~ Harper Lee
- “If the noun is good and the verb is strong, you almost never need an adjective.” ~ J. Anthony Lukas
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“Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.” ~ Henry James
- “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.” ~ Mark Twain
- “The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.” ~ Clifton Fadiman
- “What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epithet on in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning ‘placed on top’, ‘added’, ‘appended’, ‘foreign’. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.” ~ Anne Carson
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“The adjective is the enemy of the noun. Variant: The adjective is the enemy of the substantive.” ~ Voltaire
- “One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.” ~ Kenneth Koch - “To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.” ~ George Orwell
- “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them―then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” ~ Mark Twain
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“If you need three adjectives to describe something, then you’ve probably chosen the wrong something.” ~ Roger Rosenblatt
- “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them–then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.” ~ Mark Twain
- “They’ve a temper, some of them – particularly verbs, they’re the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs.” ~ Lewis Carroll
- “Nice writing isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can’t just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.” ~ Anne Bernays
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“I haven’t changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.” ~ Angela Carter
- “I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.” ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- “As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.” ~ Mark Twain
- “When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list – even if it’s a mental list that you make – of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.” ~ Omari Hardwick
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“I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.” ~ Angela Carter
- “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” ~ Stephen King
- “I like me better naked. I don’t mean that in a vain way… When you put clothes on, you immediately put a character on. Clothes are adjectives, they are indicators. When you don’t have any clothes on, it’s just you, raw, and you can’t hide.” ~ Padma Lakshmi
- “Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer’s claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.” ~ Irving Howe
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“Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.” ~ Dick Schaap
- “The Oscars have become such a big deal these days that it’s just used as adjective.” ~ Mira Sorvino
- “I think my mistakes were kind of common – leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.” ~ Dick Schaap
- “To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.” ~ Gregory Bateson
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“Frankly I’ve never really subscribed to these adjectives tagging me as an ‘icon’, ‘superstar’, etc. I’ve always thought of myself as an actor doing his job to the best of his ability.” ~ Amitabh Bachchan
- “In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.” ~ Mortimer Adler
- “You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.” ~ Larry McMurtry
- “QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman’s name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
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“The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.” ~ David Ogilvy
- “My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don’t need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let’s play him more.” ~ Jacques Barzun
- “I think ‘ambitious’ is one of those adjectives used for women in a derogatory way.” ~ Clare Balding
- “You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.” ~ Mark Twain
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“When you catch an adjective, kill it.” ~ Mark Twain
- “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” ~ William Strunk, Jr.
- “Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don’t know if it’s because older women are more confident, or just that we don’t care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write; I take out adjectives and adverbs and keep the description to a minimum.” ~ Tracy Chevalier
- “Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after another sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.” ~ Virginia Woolf
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“Millennials are often portrayed as apathetic, disinterested, tuned out and selfish. None of those adjectives describe the Millennials I’ve been privileged to meet and work with.” ~ Chelsea Clinton
- “The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
- “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” ~ Samuel Johnson
- “The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.” ~ Philip Roth
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“The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes” ~ Julie Powell
- “To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words…. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.” ~ George Orwell
- “What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.” ~ Marcel Duchamp
- “Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. … It is comprehensible when I write: “The man sat on the grass,” because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: “The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.” The brain can’t grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.” ~ Anton Chekhov
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“Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.” ~ Mary Oliver
- “All people in the world – who are not hermits or mutes – speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, “How are you” or “I’m not feeling well” all over the world. These common words – these common elements that we have between us – the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.” ~ Maya Angelou
- “All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.” ~ Joseph Devlin
- “I was a little excited but mostly blorft. “Blorft” is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.” ~ Tina Fey
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“The day you stop being compassionate, your adjective of human drops!” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
- “Hitler did not have Mussolini’s revolutionary socialist background… Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘capitalism’ and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives ‘socialist’ and ‘worker’ in the official name of Hitler’s party (‘The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers’ Party’) had not merely propagandistic value… On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that ‘basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.'” ~ Richard Pipes
- “I had always thought that the ‘good,’ and the ‘bad’ and the ‘violent’ did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.” ~ Sergio Leone
- “I am troubled by the devaluing of the word ‘design’. I find myself now being somewhat embarrassed to be called a designer. In fact I prefer the German term, Gestalt-Ingenieur. Apple and Vitsoe are relatively lone voices treating the discipline of design seriously in all corners of their businesses. They understand that design is not simply an adjective to place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance its value. Ever fewer people appear to understand that design is a serious profession; and for our future welfare we need more companies to take that profession seriously.” ~ Dieter Rams
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“Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.” ~ William Zinsser
- “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective ‘elderly’ requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “My pet peeve and my goal in life is to somehow get an adjective for ‘integrity’ in the dictionary. ‘Truthful’ doesn’t really cover it, or ‘genuine.’ It should be like ‘integritus.'” ~ Rashida Jones
- “Lord Darlington (LD): I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. Lady Windemere (LW): If we had ‘hard-and-fast rules’ we would find life much simpler. LD: You allow of no exceptions? LW: None! LD: Ah, what a fascinating Puritan you are, LW. LW: The adjective was unnecessary, LD.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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“When we put words together – adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object – we start to talk to each other.” ~ Donald Hall
- “Lord Darlington (LD): I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. Lady Windemere (LW): If we had ‘hard-and-fast rules’ we would find life much simpler. LD: You allow of no exceptions? LW: None! LD: Ah, what a fascinating Puritan you are, LW. LW: The adjective was unnecessary, LD.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “I have been called ‘Bongshell’ the day I stepped into showbiz. So, any adjective coming my way, I take it positively. Sometimes it’s also entertaining, but I don’t feel bad about it. I’m a proud woman.” ~ Bipasha Basu
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“I know I look good. The regular adjectives that come my way – sexy, hot, dusky, bong bombshell I love them.” ~ Bipasha Basu
- “When the copulative kai [`and’] connects two nouns of the same case, [viz. nouns (either substantive or adjective, or participles), of personal description, respecting office, dignity, affinity, or connexion, and attributes, properties, or qualities, good or ill], if the article [ho], or any of its cases, precedes the first of the said nouns or participles, and is not repeated before the second noun or participle, the latter always relates to the same person that is expressed or described by the first noun or participle: i.e. it denotes a farther description of the first-named person.” ~ Granville Sharp
- “A relativist is an individual who doesn’t know the difference between an adjective and an adverb.” ~ Bill Gaede
