Best 88 quotes in «vocabulary quotes» category

When we start making distinctions between soul and spirit, we're in very, very murky waters. There is the whole issue of the English language, which has a rather limited vocabulary when it comes to psychological descriptions, not to speak of spiritual descriptions. We're good mythically - the English language is superb for myth. But we're not very good for psychology or spirituality.

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?

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.

A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

At the end of each day, Elizabeth read to me. She had shelves and shelves of children's classics, dusty hardcovers with stamped gold titles: 'The Secret Garden', 'Pollyanna', and 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'. But I preferred her viticulture textbooks, the illustrations of plants and chemical equations clues to the world that surrounded me. I memorized vocabulary- nitrate leaching, carbon sequestration, integrated pest management- and used them in casual conversation with a seriousness that made Elizabeth laugh.

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.

How many words are you having trouble with, sir?" "Just the ones that I've highlighted." "I count at least a dozen, and I haven't gotten out of the first paragraph." "That's as far as I got, too. I'm not sure you and I speak the same language.

You can't build a vocabulary without reading. You can't meet friends if you ... stay at home by yourself all the time. In the same way, you can't build up a vocabulary if you never meet any new words. And to meet them you must read. The more you read the better.

Greeley knew no language but his, but of that, he possessed a most extraordinary mastery. An employee

Here's my using dickwad in a sentence. Greg is such a dickwad, he locks his car in the Pagoda Pizza parking lot. (No. That isn't a real Vocab word.)

He who would enrich and enlarge his stock of words must soak and tan his mind constantly in the vats of literature.

If I had been born in the 1700′s, presumably children had a bigger vocabulary than I had which means I wouldn’t have been able to recite fairy tales to kids because I’m not smart enough. You know…? I’d have to be like…..uh: In time passed, though not long ago, there lived three pigs in stature, little in number, three, who being of an age both entitled and inspired to seek their fortune did set about to do thusly. When they had traveled a distance, pig numbered first spake saying, “Harken Brethren, head this impetuous realm! Tarry me far from hearth and home I fear we shall fair *snort* not well!” And so being collectively agreed, but individually impaled, the diminutive swine sought each to erect himself an abode.....

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words.

If you are writing for an educated audience and, to take an example, you use the phrase mutatis mutandis, you are not showing off—you are communicating. You are using words to do what words are supposed to do. It reminds me of the time that someone complained to William F. Buckley about all the unusual words that he would employ. His reply was that the words were not unusual to him. Words are there for a reason, and foreign phrases can often do the trick that more homey phrases cannot. But if you are blogging about your adventures as a shopping mom, and you write about your purchase of a 48-pack of corn dogs at Costco, and you describe them as de provenance étrangère, it had better be a joke. Unusual words or phrases (foreign and domestic) are a barrier to understanding, unless the point is to communicate to the reader that you know something they don't. Then they understand what you are doing quite well.

I had to give up what God cursed, that which gives temptation and grows the most precious fruits. Supreme mathematics, it's a deep waters of numbers and letters, chemical elements breathed in, an asthmatic solution leaving you breathless to the findings of cyphered encryptions. A marksmen with this ink pen. Alpha-Beta Greek translated into modern speaking with 26 characteristics that create every compound of vocabulary. Infatuated with all plays of words, breaking this bread to the brain of birds. Give God reverence for understanding.

I hereby propose the term “miserize”, as a verb for misery – referring to “to cause misery”.

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

It's when your eyes rested on mine, I knew eyes had their own vocabulary.

I wish there was a word for what you're doing. I wish there was a word for being blind to someone's situation because you think you know how it feels and you use some tiny part of your own experience and extrapolate it to theirs without realizing that you have a choice and that they have none.

Lots of words are there, vocabulary, in tonns of languages......still none to manifest my feelings.!! bahut saare shabd hain, phir bhi mujhe shabdo ki kami pad rahi hai.

Norman Mailer enhances the beauty of pugilism by elegantly exploring it.

OK, so the guy is cool, but... I mean own up, this is barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical mass, this is... this is... total vocabulary failure!

He uses the nice old words so rich in tradition to be sure I know he means it.

I like to quote Shakespeare. But in this case, the rapper Eminem said it best: Words are a motherfucker.

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing.

Milton's learned vocabulary [...] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents' speech as heard by the child.

Most adults have a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, meaning that children must learn 10 to 20 words a day between the ages of eight months and 18 years. And yet the most frequent 100 words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4000 words account for 98% of conversation.

Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.

Mr. Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldn’t find the apposite word, if you found your language slipping into the mire of vagueness and obscurity, this meant that you needed to work on your vocabulary. Because the apposite word certainly existed – and it was very eager to make your acquaintance.

Our choice of words often reveal the depth of our knowledge … or ignorance … or that of our desire to be deemed knowledgeable.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.

Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences.

So much of what we read and write these days is disposable.

Stephen King is a powerful guy, will powerful vocabulary.

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it's always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read.

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.

The Present Vocabulary certain obligations blocks my perception another dimension a vision without alteration without wall of illusion blocking my perception forget the presentations no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions no intention to tell you about my mistakes pass I represent the present vocabulary be indulgent learn from your mistakes of your misfortune and obliterate your fear be indulgent to guard what is being dissipated is impossible if you do not want to sink you must learn to swim and take strength because his world and become far too fierce I have no intention of being for you a recreation attention to any division of concentration as a vision of illusion the exclusion of all perceptions of emotions without any understanding of good and bad intentions concentration mode, watch out for reverberation, bad reaction, a pawn you want action, go back do your preparation without any interaction no need for explanation no need for presentations no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions all these voices a place of disarray in the middle of all these voices the fights are without faith or law in the middle of all these voices no odds to escape and auctanperer you can forget my mind and there to create prisoner never I'm here to show you with the thinking of passing moments and the vocabulary of the present moment for a decent future absent not writing insistent on days much more clement for my present and the mind filled with writing he is not stupid by technology Develop my thoughts often full of words store no time to rest I will not give up no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions enclose between two dimensions no need for presentation or tell you about my intentions errors are passed and now I represent the vocabulary present.

Nature itself a language with strong Vocabulary, each day it teaches us new Words.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. 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.

There are two words that I believe could be completely eradicated from our vocabulary – “I can’t.” These two words are so definite that they leave absolutely no room for hope. Instead, I suggest we use the phrase, “How can I?

This document outlines our plan to perpetrate insurance fraud, insider trading, and character assassination. ...hopefully tripling our paycheck on this job. Okay, see? Those words I understand just fine. Use them more often. -Lieutenant Massey Reynstein & Captain Tagon

The utmost accolade a writer can receive is that the reader is incognizant of his presence. The writer must put no obstacles in the reader’s way. Therefore I try avoid words that he must puzzle over, or that he cannot gloss from context; and when I make up names, I shun the use of diacritical marks that he must sound out, thus halting the flow; and in general, I try to keep the sentences metrically pleasing, so that they do not obtrude upon the reader’s mind.

The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.

This year my goal will be to learn new vocabulary in English and to read as much as possible books.

We have no way of knowing what words you are going to misuse, so we cannot offer you a list. What we can offer, though, is a test that you yourself can apply to any word, whenever you are in doubt. A Test: Do I Know This Word? Ask yourself: 'Do I know this word?' If the answer is no, then you do not know it.