Dictionary Quotes - Page 14

• Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well. to his daughter Martha

  Thomas Jefferson

  Daughter, Writing, Caring

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.45, Cambridge University Press

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we ever know? If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words? Why is 'phonics' not spelled the way it sounds? How come abbreviated is such a long word?

  George Carlin

  Long, Way, Firsts

  6 Copy quote

• As an artist you're looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I'm striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they've swallowed a f... dictionary.

  Damien Hirst

  Hate, Writing, Artist

  40 Copy quote

• There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

  Jack Lynch

  Jack Lynch (2009). “The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park”, p.96, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• H. L Mencken's Dictionary of the American Language supplies a long list of slang terms for being drunk, but the Irish are no slouches, either. They're spannered, rat-arsed, cabbaged, and hammered; ruined, legless, scorched, and blottoed; or simply trolleyed or sloshed. In Kerry, you're said to be flamin'; in Waterford, you're in the horrors; and in Cavan, you've gone baloobas, a tough one to wrap your tongue around if you ARE baloobas. In Donegal, you're steamin', while the afflicted in Limerick are out of their tree.

  Bill Barich

  Long, Drunk, Tree

  4 Copy quote

• The verb 'to darn' is explained in my pocket dictionary as follows: 'To mend by imitating the texture of the stuff, with thread and needle.' But this definition does not correspond to the work accomplished by good Chinese housewives. When they mend a sock, they do not try 'to imitate the texture of the stuff'. Their art makes no attempt at concealment: it even takes a certain pride in revealing itself.

  Daniele Vare

  Art, Pride, Chinese

  4 Copy quote

• Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they are actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social hierarchy before it rejects them. The dictionary defines slackers as people who evade duties and responsibilities. A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for.

  Richard Linklater

  Responsibility, People, Social Hierarchy

  14 Copy quote

• What's a depression? The dictionary says a depression is a dent. And what's a dent? Everybody knows a dent is a hole. And what's a hole? You tell me what's a hole! And I'll tell you that a hole is nothin'!

  Jimmy Durante

  Depression, Holes, Knows

  30 Copy quote

• I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. In that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians. To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.

  Max Muller

  Mean, Eye, Hair

  "Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas". Book by Max Müller, 1888.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sound is the vocabulary of nature... noises are as well articulated as the words in a dictionary... Opposing the world of sound is the world of music.

  Pierre Schaeffer

  Vocabulary, Sound, World

  Interview with the Pioneer of Musique Concrete, vol. 2, n° 1, 1987.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached "China," thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that "china" is Cockney rhyming slang for "mate." People say "my old china," meaning "my old mate," because "china plate" rhymes with "mate.

  China Mieville

  Beautiful, Hippie, Names

  4 Copy quote

• Cantona's expression speaking the whole French dictionary without saying a word.

  Barry Davies

  Football, Expression, Cantona

  5 Copy quote

• We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.

  Herman Melville

  Lying, Thinking, Secret

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.4889, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everybody talks about being a role model. But if you look up the word 'role' in a dictionary, it describes playing a part. Everything I'm into, it's real to me. There's nothing fake about it.

  Shaquille O'Neal

  Basketball, Real, Role Models

  6 Copy quote

• Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.

  David Bowie

  Intellectual, Critics, Wells

  David Bowie (2016). “David Bowie: The Last Interview”, p.31, Melville House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

  Alan Watts

  People, World, Want

  10 Copy quote

• Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?

  Russell M. Nelson

  Printing, Explosions, Produce

  9 Copy quote

• The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.

  Benjamin Tucker

  Acceptance, Errors, Lexicographer

  Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1972). “Instead of a Book”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fail, it's not in my dictionary. I've got a good dictionary up there and the words 'fail' and 'failure' have been ruled out for years. I don't know what people are talking about who use that word. All I do know is temporary non-success, even if I've got to wait another 20 years for what I'm after, and I try to put that into people, no matter what their object in life.

  Percy Cerutty

  Talking, Years, People

  39 Copy quote

• What's my philosophy? In a word, integral. And what on earth-or in heaven-do I mean by "integral"? The dictionary meaning is fairly simple: "comprehensive, balanced, inclusive, essential for completeness." Short definition, tall order.

  Ken Wilber

  Philosophy, Mean, Simple

  "An Integral Spirituality". Beliefnet Essay, www.beliefnet.com. March 2004.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The dictionary definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One-Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world.

  Ammon Hennacy

  Christian, Confused, Men

  Ammon Hennacy (2010). “The Book of Ammon”, p.19, Wipf and Stock Publishers

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.

  James Webb Young

  Reading, Ideas, Stories

  4 Copy quote

• My pet peeve and my goal in life is to somehow get an adjective for 'integrity' in the dictionary. 'Truthful' doesn't really cover it, or 'genuine.' It should be like 'integritus.'

  Rashida Jones

  Integrity, Goal, Pet

  4 Copy quote

• There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.

  Cornelia Otis Skinner

  Cities, Gourmet, Flavor

  11 Copy quote

• Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads.

  Joseph Epstein

  Moon, People, May

  4 Copy quote