Best Vocabulary Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 7

“If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.”

Ifs Dies Freedom Ready Words Vocabulary Muslim Not Ready Your Freedom Ready To Die American Independence Day Hajj

“I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.”

People My Own Surprise Vocabulary Linguistics Linguists

“White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.”

Used Spirit White Enormous Rhythm March Vocabulary Militant Groove Polka

Author:Joni Mitchell

“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.”

Author:Jim Morrison

“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.”

Ifs Wells Important Leadership Business Products Tests Advertising Consumers Vocabulary Marketplace Important Words

Book:Confessions of an advertising man

Source: Confessions of an advertising man

“Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn't expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.”

Littles Stills Song Space Audience Special Effects Produce Emotional Depth Pops Artistic Concerts Vocabulary Special Effects Pop Song Catchy Rapport Overkill

Author:Camille Paglia

“We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.”

Moving Time Community Impossible Health Disease Trials Each Day Injury Vocabulary Symptoms

Author:Christopher Reeve

“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.”

Giving Writing Important Understanding Important Things Vocabulary Good Writing

Author:J. K. Rowling

“When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary and I speak in paragraphs. I'm more eloquent. I plan to wear them more often.”

Speak Plans Heels Vocabulary Paragraph Eloquent High Heels

Author:Meg Ryan

“Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.”

Humans Stills Felt Knowing Capable Communicate Vocabulary Recognizing

Author:Jose Saramago

“Sound is the vocabulary of nature.”

Sound Vocabulary Corny

Author:Pierre Schaeffer

“I panicked when my son, Jett, stopped eating baby food. He's only two but his food vocabulary is fantastic. He likes my baked tilapia and string beans with chopped garlic. But he really likes pizza. Sometimes every inanimate object to him is pizza.”

Two Sometimes Objects Son Baby Eating Likes Fantastic Strings My Son Vocabulary Pizza Beans Garlic Inanimate Objects

Author:Jill Scott

“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.”

Men Creatures Bread Vocabulary English Language Vocabulary Words

Author:Robert Louis Stevenson

“There's a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.”

School Goes On Vocabulary Vocabulary Words Memorization

Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives, their creativity.”

Book Wanted Creativity Dresses Metaphor Wedding Vocabulary Wedding Day Wedding Dress

Author:Vera Wang

“We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

Language Communication Beats Occasions Unconscious Pockets Vocabulary English Language Pursued Alleys Rifles Foreign Language Vocabulary Words Alleyways American Language

Author:Booker T. Washington

“Retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren't going to get rid of me that way.”

Way Teacher Retirement Vocabulary Retired

Author:Betty White

“One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.”

Thinking Has Beens Self Reason Helping Sides Emotion Moral Self Help Negative Harder Reason Why Replaced Vocabulary Good And Bad Beneficial Negative Thinking Lexicon

Author:Julian Baggini

“I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable.”

World Christian Given Black Views Acceptable Vocabulary Norm Orientation World View

Author:Michael Eric Dyson

“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.”

Made Lines Emotion Century Design Harder Communicate Made It Designer Vocabulary Curves Modernism 19th Century Ornaments Straight Lines Expressive Eliminating

Author:Eva Zeisel

“The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.”

“In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors”

Should Facts Past Critics Conception Indispensable Vocabulary Essays Rivalry Connotation Polemics Precursor

Author:Jorge Luis Borges

“Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.”

Activity Delightful Vocabulary Learning New

Book:Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style

Source: Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style

“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.”

Source: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“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.”

Thinking Progress Thinker Vocabulary Doers Talkers

Author:Francois de La Rochefoucauld

“Threats are the last resort of a man with no vocabulary.”

Men Lasts Threat Vocabulary Resorts

Book:Protector of the Small Quartet

Source: Protector of the Small Quartet

“If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.”

Ifs Way Music Best Things Nonsense New Ways Vocabulary Misunderstood

Author:Jonathan Safran Foer

“We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.”

Years Helping Common Technology Virtue Losing Built Sake Delight Vocabulary New Technology

Book:The Library at Night

Source: The Library at Night

“Im haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words. Ive been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.”

Should Littles Feelings Form Half Pieces Happened Childhood Events Evening Dimensions Vocabulary Scrap Examining

Book:Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

Source: Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

“And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are: Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.”

“What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.”

Men Should Has Beens Body Action Weapons Concern Should Have Bounds Vocabulary Should Have Been Extending Adjectives

Author:Joseph Brodsky

“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.”

Ifs Trying Please Metaphor Torture Acquire Going Away Vocabulary Courtesy Cliche Intimidating

Author:Dean Koontz

“Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.”

Girl Emotion Vocabulary Annuals Inexplicable Julia Crumbs

Book:One Good Turn: (Jackson Brodie)

Source: One Good Turn: (Jackson Brodie)

“Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.”

Ifs Together Used Lovers Late Too Late Vocabulary Bashful

Author:Milan Kundera

“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”

Lines Crosses Circles Defined Vocabulary Confined Crossings Loops

Author:A. S. Byatt

“English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.”

Way Should Humans Made Language Planets Tongue Despite Made It Inevitable Vocabulary Flexible Barbaric

Author:Robert A. Heinlein

“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.”

People Knows Giving Wells Mean Persons Doe Evil Deals Stranger Guarantees Vocabulary Good Person Guarantees That

Author:Daniel Handler

“It's funny how certain objects convey a message - my washer and dryer, for example. They can't speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I'm doing fairly well. "No more laundromat for you," they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, "Well, he must be doing _something - _my numbers is off the charts." The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary, and says only one thing: "You are going to die."”

Wells I Can Certain Dies Courses Speak Numbers One Thing Example Objects Messages Scales Cooks Vocabulary Bathroom Shouting Skeletons Stoves Dryers Downers Laundromats

Author:David Sedaris

“On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised--fully extirpated--absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary!”

Should Desire Fall Letters Manifestation Officials Vocabulary Council July Wednesday Verdict Tiles

Author:Mark Dunn

“There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.”

Earth Walks Flesh Sheer Vocabulary Grammar Vertebrates

Book:Language made plain

Source: Language made plain

“Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.”

Ifs Way Art Facts Feelings Remember Fiction Talking Creativity Findings Metaphor Stores New Ways Vocabulary Connecting

Book:The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

Source: The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.”

Source: The Left Hand of Darkness

“She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it's in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowoah doowoah.”

Ifs Feels Past Wonder Chemicals Vocabulary Nostalgic

Book:If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

Source: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

“The world going insane and evil letting slip the birds of war is no excuse for sloppy vocabulary.”

World War Evil Bird Excuse Insane Slips Vocabulary No Excuses Sloppy

Author:P. C. Cast

“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.”

“Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over.”

Men Humans Seems Turns Hundred Every Man Phrases Repeats Occupation Routine Formulas Vocabulary Twists Twists And Turns

Author:Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

“I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.”

Source: Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps

“You need to up your vocabulary, boy. You can’t walk around letting people think you’re stupid. Expand your horizons. Besides, it’s fun to call people names they have to look up to realize they’ve been insulted. (Mark) Yeah, that’s a twofer there. You get away with it and then they’re twice as mad when they realize how bad you really insulted them. Especially if they mistake it for a compliment when you say it and thank you for it. (Bubba)”

People Ifs Thinking Needs Looks Names Fun Realizing Walks Mistake Boys Stupid Mark Yeah Mad Look Up Get Away Horizon Compliment Vocabulary Insulted Bubba You Re Stupid

Author:Sherrilyn Kenyon

“Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.”

Men Ends Reality Certain Circumstances Reflection Function Vocabulary Selection Deflection

Book:On Symbols and Society

Source: On Symbols and Society

“There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.”

Littles Problem Beautiful Common Cities Consciousness Fire Greater Sky Streets Source Bears Protect Safe Approach Variety Smoke Flames Holocaust Hunting Vocabulary Stains Resonance Syntax

Author:Samuel R. Delany

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Vocabulary Quotes