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A Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All A Quotes

“All words are borrowed. The beauty of writing is how they flow through us and arrange themselves as something new but familiar. We can be unique and belong at the same time. In moments of confusion, anger, and sadness, words lend comfort, letting us know that someone else has navigated the same tempestuous tides and survived.”

“All words have to be coined by a wordsmith at some point in the mists of history. The wordsmith had an idea to get across and needed a sound to express it. In principle, any sound would have done - basic principle of linguistics is that the relation of a sound to a meaning is arbitrary - so the first coiner of a term from for a political affiliation, for instance, could have used glorg or schmendrick or mcgillicuddy. But people are poor at conjuring sounds out of the blue, and they probably wanted to ease their listeners understanding of the coinage rather than having to define it or illustrate it with examples. So they reached for a metaphor that reminded them of the idea and they hoped would evoke a similar idea in the minds of their listeners, such as band or bond for a political affiliation. The metaphorical hint allowed the listeners to cotton on to the meaning more quickly than if they had had to rely on context alone, giving the word an advantage in the Darwinian competition among neologisms […] The word spread and became endemic to the community, adding to the language’s stock of apparent metaphors. But then it came to be used often enough, and in enough contexts, the speakers kicked the ladder away, and today people think not a whit about the metaphorical referent. It persists as a semantic fossil, a curiosity to amuse etymologists and wordwatchers [stet], but with no more resonance in our minds than any other string of vowels and consonants.”

“All work nourishes the soul of your creative imagination. And all work increases your understanding of your craft. Sometimes a work takes a flower, sometimes it merely enriches the soil. And sometimes the seed of an idea, long abandoned and even forgotten, emerges suddenly in a place where it was least expected. And sometimes the blooms that it produces are the most beautiful of al.”

“All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this pre-acceptance of the pain and torment, they will be visited upon us in an otherwise necessary individual and universal collapse. Anyone disassociated from his origin and his spiritually sensed task acts against origin. Anyone who acts against it has neither a today nor a tomorrow.”