Vocabulary famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
-- A. S. Byatt -
As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.
-- Aaron Siskind -
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
As you can appreciate over my lifetime I've developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box.
-- Adrian Belew -
So many young decorators are trying to reinvent the wheel, and the results are sometimes very dubious. They're striving to do things that have never been done before. Quite often it is done without authority, without knowledge, and without a background in taste. They need to be educated about the past, and they need a richer vocabulary.
-- Albert Hadley -
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in subsituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly,those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
-- Aldous Huxley -
I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.
-- Alexandra Fuller -
Fear is not a part of my vocabulary, actually, and I think that it's really made me a much smarter, braver for sure, person.
-- Alicia Keys -
The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border.
-- Amos Oz -
My Vocabularies vary, its so exclusionary You'll find my baby pictures in modern dictionaries Next to mighty mercenaries, and visual visionaries
-- Andre Nickatina -
The citizen is becoming a pawn in a game where nobody knows the rules, where everybody consequently doubts that there are rules at all, and where the vocabulary has been diminished to such an extent that nobody is even sure what the game is all about.
-- Andrew Eldritch -
Appetites have only one word in their vocabulary - MORE. Appetites are never fully and finally satisfied. Even after the most satisfying meal imaginable, we eventually find ourselves rummaging through the pantry for a snack.
-- Andy Stanley -
Many people are afraid to talk about race because it's so emotionally loaded. We don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.
-- Anna Deavere Smith -
Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!
-- Anne McCaffrey -
I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.
-- Annie Leibovitz -
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
-- Anthony Burgess -
Birdy never felt artistic inclination when armed with a marking implement. What came to her were words, always words, commentary and criticism and correction and simple vocabulary curios; she scratched a few of them on the smooth red wall.
-- Antonya Nelson -
A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.
-- Ari Marmell -
The mind is incredible. Once you've gained mastery over it, channeling its powers positively for your purposes, you can do anything. I mean anything. The secret is to make your mind work for you not against you. This means constantly being positive. Constantly setting up challenges you can meet either today, next week, or next month. "I can't..." should be permanently stricken from your vocabulary, especially the vocabulary of your thoughts. You must see yourself always growing and improving.
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger -
The words "I Can't" should be permanently stricken from your vocabulary, especially the vocabulary of your thoughts. You must see yourself always growing and improving.
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger -
I think the most overused words in our vocabulary in the South are black and white.
-- Artur Davis -
It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.
-- Barbara Kruger -
By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.
-- Benjamin Carson -
Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one's vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.
-- Bergen Evans -
It is in the measure that special methods acknowledge their common core in transcendental method, that norms common to all the sciences will be acknowledged, that a secure basis will be attained for tackling interdisciplinary problems, and that the sciences will be mobilized within a higher unity of vocabulary, thought and orientation, in which they will be able to make their quite significant contribution to the solution of fundamental problems.
-- Bernard Lonergan -
Drawing is the simplest way of establishing a picture vocabulary because it is an instant, personal declaration of what is important and what is not.
-- Betty Goodwin -
Retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren't going to get rid of me that way.
-- Betty White -
Conservatives or better, pro- corporate apologists hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like " progress ," " opportunity ," and " individualism " into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right ... This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.
-- Bill Moyers -
Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress...
-- Blaise Cendrars -
I learned a long time ago that you don't have to go around using bad language and trying to hurt people to show how macho you are. That stuff won't get you anywhere, it just shows lack of vocabulary and character.
-- Bobby Bowden -
My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation ...
-- Carol Gilligan -
My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.
-- Charles Frazier -
What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?
-- Charles Frazier -
Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.
-- Chuck Thompson -
Over the course of several articles, I will give you the tools to become a sentence connoisseur as well as a sentence artisan. Each of my lessons will give you the insight to appreciate fine sentences and the vocabulary to talk about them.
-- Constance Hale -
Xenial' is a word which refers to the giving of gifts to strangers. . . . I know that having a good vocabulary doesn't guarantee that I'm a good person. . . . But it does mean I've read a great deal. And in my experience, well-read people are less likely to be evil.
-- Daniel Handler -
First, we have to find a common vocabulary for energy security. This notion has a radically different meaning for different people. For Americans it is a geopolitical question. For the Europeans right now it is very much focused on the dependence on imported natural gas.
-- Daniel Yergin -
Remove 'can't', 'won't' and 'shouldn't' from your vocabulary when they restrict attainment. Persevere if you truly believe your cause is just.
-- Danny Villanueva -
Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.
-- David Crystal -
there was a time before you but I can't remember it now a time before your beauty and I were formally introduced I'm sure I lived without you but I don't remember how can't imagine living without these feelings you've produced just one glance and my life was redrawn just one word and my vocabulary changed I asked the time and you said 'what's the hurry?' you asked my name and I almost forgot
-- David Levithan -
Happiness is so rarely a part of my vocabulary, because for me it's so fleeting
-- David Levithan -
The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.
-- David Ogilvy -
One barrier... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.
-- David Perkins -
Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.
-- Dean Koontz -
I’m not too keen on talking. I always have the feeling that the words are getting away from me, escaping and scattering. It’s not to do with vocabulary or meanings, because I know quite a lot of words, but when I come out with them they get confused and scattered. That’s why I avoid stories and speeches and just stick to answering the questions I’m asked. All the extra words, the overflow, I keep to myself, the words that I silently multiply to get close to the truth.
-- Delphine de Vigan -
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
-- Derek Walcott -
In Greek mythology, the hero wants to be great, but the very concept does not exist in the Indian vocabulary. Yet it has become the global template. And it's a template that won't fit in India.
-- Devdutt Pattanaik -
I'm Howard Stern with a vocabulary. I'm the man he wishes he could be.
-- Don Imus -
In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.
-- Donald E. Westlake -
What is comfortable fashion? To be comfortable, that can't be in the vocabulary of fashion. If you want to be comfortable, stay home in your pajamas.
-- Donatella Versace -
The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.
-- Dorothea Lange -
What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.
-- E. L. Doctorow -
So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.
-- Edward Sapir -
I need to eliminate 'like' from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, 'That's seriously like ' I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.
-- Eli Roth -
Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.
-- Ellen Goodman -
It's important to read because it's really good for your vocabulary. It's really good for your imagination. I enjoy reading because I find it relaxing.
-- Emma Watson -
Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.
-- Eva Zeisel -
Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.
-- Evan Esar -
One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
-- Evelyn Waugh -
Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld -
It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.
-- Fred Frith -
It's very hard to get pretentious about beer. You can become knowledgeable and start to talk with a highfalutin' vocabulary. But you can only go so far with beer, and I've always liked that.
-- Fritz Maytag -
All my life, people have made fun of the way I speak. I guess because a lot of my vocabulary is made up of things that other people say. I started making fun of them and imitating them and now that's how I speak.
-- Gabourey Sidibe -
Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling. The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don’t just convey information, but also personality.
-- Gene Weingarten -
Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.
-- George Mikes -
I think our family is like a lot of families. We had no vocabulary for mental illness
-- Glenn Close -
My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.
-- Grace Paley -
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
-- Harold Bloom -
The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work.
-- Harold Rosenberg -
Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.
-- Harry Mathews -
[The word class has] been excised from the acceptable political vocabulary, except in the limited usage of right-wingers when they accuse liberals of inciting 'class warfare' - a charge that means it's okay for rich people to vote their economic interests but it's not all right to encourage poor people to do so.
-- Harry Shearer -
In my vocabulary there are two bad words: art and good taste.
-- Helmut Newton -
A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.
-- Henry Hazlitt -
Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.
-- Henry Petroski -
It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.
-- Henry Theodore Tuckerman -
Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.
-- Herbert Spencer -
Failure was not an option. It just wasn't in my vocabulary.
-- Hilary Devey -
From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.
-- Ian Hacking -
Consonance, says the dictionary, is the combination of several tones into a harmonic unit. Dissonance results from the deranging of this harmony by the addition of tones foreign to it. One must admit that all this is not clear. Ever since it appeared in our vocabulary, the word 'dissonance' has carried with it a certain odor of sinfulness. Let us light our lantern: in textbook language, dissonance is an element of transition, a complex or interval of tones that is not complete in itself and that must be resolved to the ear's satisfaction into a perfect consonance.
-- Igor Stravinsky -
Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region.
-- Israel Shenker -
The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
-- J. K. Rowling -
You must take responsibility for removing I can't from your vocabulary.
-- Jack Canfield -
I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.
-- Jack Gilbert -
Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.
-- Jacques Barzun -
I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.
-- James Agee -
Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.
-- James Merrill -
The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.
-- Jamie Dimon -
It's interesting to help someone find their vocabulary. There would not have been a De Niro without a Scorsese.
-- Jason Patric -
Rick Perry told reporters this week that he has a permit to carry a concealed handgun. He also has a concealed vocabulary, concealed knowledge of the issues, concealed tolerance...
-- Jay Leno -
Vocabulary enables us to interpret and to express. If you have a limited vocabulary, you will also have a limited vision and a limited future.
-- Jim Rohn -
It's okay to send flowers, but don't let the flowers do all the talking. Flowers have a limited vocabulary. About the best flowers can say is that you remembered. But your words tell the rest.
-- Jim Rohn -
Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society.
-- Jimmy Reid -
since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.
-- Joan Aiken -
I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself... That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.
-- Joan Miro -
Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.
-- John Charles Polanyi -
I don't have an extensive background in theory, but the amount of it that I've learned, I've applied, so I have a vocabulary of melodic and rhythmic relationships. And that's all theory is - it's symbols to help you identify those relationships.
-- John Frusciante -
Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.
-- John H. McWhorter -
It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.
-- John Humphrys
