Dictionary Quotes - Page 10

• Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.

  Laurence Sterne

  Learning, Science, Grammar

  Laurence Sterne (1805). “The Works of Laurence Sterne, A. M.: A sentimental journey through France and Italy. The Koran: or, The life, character and sentiments of Tria Juncta in Uno. A political romance”, p.339

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• Beware of charisma . . . Representative Men; was Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1850 phrase for the great men in a democracy . . . Is there some common quality among these Representative Men who have been most successful as our leaders? I call it the need to be authentic-or, as our dictionaries tell us, conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance or belief. While the charismatic has an uncanny outside source of strength, the authentic is strong because he is what he seems to be.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Strong, Successful, Men

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• A song doesn't just come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out. 'No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

  Dorothy Fields

  Song, Writing, Giving

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• Now a Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as descended from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary; but you and I know what a Jew is - One Who Killed Our Lord. And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagan or not, will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce.

  Lenny Bruce

  Christian, Deuces, Tribes

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• The traditional dictionary definition of the difference is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout, come to, and apologize for it. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it. But ultimately I think all addictions boil down to just not being able to be with yourself for any long degree of time.

  Jerry Stahl

  Thinking, Differences, Addiction

  "Jerry Stahl Talks Smack". Interview with Royal Young, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 25, 2013.

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• I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a "surly, illmannered, badtempered fellow." ... Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.

  Edward Abbey

  Hate, Fire, Sheep

  "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness".

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• As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

  Albert J. Nock

  Book, Reading, Interesting

  Memoirs of a Superfluous Man ch. 1 (1943)

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• Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Men, Conversation, Reasonable

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• Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Desire, Novelists, United States

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• My dictionary has no such expression as a violent fight.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Fighting, Expression, Violence

  Mahatma Gandhi (1958). “Collected Works”

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• I bought a dictionary. First thing I did was, I looked up the word "dictionary", and it said "you're an asshole".

  Demetri Martin

  Funny, Humor, Firsts

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• A very simple and useful device is to have a memorandum-book, so small that it can be easily carried in the pocket, to be used instead of your mind to keep note of any errand or any appointment that you may have. The Standard Diary, less than four inches long and less than two and a half inches wide, is one of the best for this purpose. ...In fact, such diaries as these, in their wide range of information, would seem to be all that one needs in practical life, the only other book that at all approaches them in this respect being unquestionably Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

  Anna Brackett

  Book, Simple, Two

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• The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around.

  Mary Norris

  Wonderful, Wonderful Things

  "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen". Book by Mary Norris, April 6, 2015.

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• I look upon this as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Desire, Want

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Boswell's Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, and Johnson's Diary of A Journey Into North Wales”, p.369

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• My life is absolutely meaningless. When I consider the different periods into which it falls, it seems like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which means in the first place a string, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth, a dust-brush.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Daughter, Fall, Mean

  Soren Kierkegaard (1959). “Either/ Or”

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• The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.

  Monique Wittig

  Rough Drafts, Language, Rough

  Monique Wittig, Sande Zeig (1979). “Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary”, Avon Books

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• I am an unmarried man, as opposed to a single man. A bachelor, according to the dictionary, is a man who has never been married. An unmarried man is not married at the moment. Many of these terms have fallen into disuse.

  Raymond Burr

  Men, Married, Single Man

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• It is intolerance to speak of toleration. Away with the word from the dictionary!

  Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau

  Speak, Intolerance, Toleration

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• [God is] all that is. Everything. Everything. Breath, life. Just get Webster's Dictionary and throw it on the floor. It's everything... God is everything.

  Iyanla Vanzant

  Breaths

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• Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like 'new music,' 'avant-garde,' or something like that, I think it's like cutting out half the dictionary.

  Archie Shepp

  Couple, Cutting, Thinking

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• Larousse Gastronomique is a veritable dictionary of cooking terms for the French kitchen. If a chef were allowed only one book, this would have to be it.

  Mario Batali

  Book, Cooking, Kitchen

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• I don't think workaholic is in the dictionary as an affliction, but it's obviously someone who has a disease, and I don't feel diseased by it. I just think that I enjoy life and life has many offerings. I feel lucky to be able to have a forum to share a lot of these ideas.

  Greg Graffin

  Thinking, Offering, Ideas

  "Greg Graffin of Bad Religion". Interview with Joshua Chaplinsky, chuckpalahniuk.net. October 18, 2010.

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• A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses.

  Lucy Larcom

  Morning, Thinking, Poetry

  Lucy Larcom (1961). “A New England girlhood”

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• I looked up the word POLITICS in the dictionary, and it's actually a combination of two words: poli, which means 'many,' and tics, which means 'bloodsuckers.'

  Jay Leno

  Mean, Two, Tics

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• In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Hands, History, Greek

  Henry David Thoreau (1975). “Early Essays and Miscellanies”, p.60, Princeton University Press

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