Usage Quotes

• English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

  E. B. White

  Communication, Luck, Taste And Judgment

  E. B. WHITE (1954). “The SECOND TREE from the CORNER”

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• Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

  Douglas Adams

  Safe, Strange, Awareness

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.35, Pan Macmillan

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• Look at growth, look at how much time people spend on the Net and look at the variety of things that they are doing. It's all really good, so I am actually encouraged by the fundamentals that underlie usage growth on the Net.

  Meg Whitman

  Business, Technology, People

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• What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Long, People, Host

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term.

  Harry Stack Sullivan

  Love, Satisfaction, Becoming

  Harry Stack Sullivan (1940). “Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry: The First William Alanson White Memorial Lectures”

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• Usage is the best language teacher.

  Quintilian

  Teacher, Language

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• The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

  Elizabeth Drew

  Sympathy, Gossip, Grace

  Elizabeth Drew (1964). “The Literature of Gossip”

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• USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as the fashion.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Hope, Fashion, Book

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.229, 谷月社

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• What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.

  Joe Dante

  Long, People, Understanding

  "24 hours of horror with Joe Dante". Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. October 31, 2012.

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• As a work progresses, its power to elicit and dictate response mounts. There seems to be an optimum moment when this power is at its greatest which just precedes the point where 'elicit' is no longer apt usage. 'Dictates' is the word for this condition and tyranny is the adversary.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Power, Progress, Moments

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• I build an entire fort out of pillows. I need at least four pillows. I need on each side, I need one normal usage pillow for the back of my head, and I need another pillow just in case.

  Charlie Worsham

  Needs, Four, Sides

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• The abbreviations (e.g. NATO, UN, USSR - E.W.) denote that and only that which is institutionalized in such a way that the transcending connotation is cut off. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Cutting, Culture, Abbreviations

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• MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

  Douglas Coupland

  School, Twenties, Inability

  Douglas Coupland (2015). “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”, p.43, Hachette UK

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• If it is possible to have a linear unit that depends on no other quantity, it would seem natural to prefer it. Moreover, a mensural unit taken from the earth itself offers another advantage, that of being perfectly analogous to all the real measurements that in ordinary usage are also made upon the earth, such as the distance between two places or the area of some tract, for example. It is far more natural in practice to refer geographical distances to a quadrant of a great circle than to the length of a pendulum.

  Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

  Distance, Real, Taken

  "Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime". Book by Charles Coulston Gillispie, p. 240, January 10, 2009.

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• There is this school of thought that says the usage of all mystical and occult powers is bad. I find that thought is usually propounded by people who don't have any powers. It's kind of a sour grapes attitude.

  Frederick Lenz

  Attitude, School, Power

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• I am not engaged to Christianity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that binds me to it -- let these be the sandy foundations of falsehoods. What I revere and obey in it is its reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to my mind, the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason through all its representation of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Echoes, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2907, Delphi Classics

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• As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Cities, People, Political

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.183, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.

  Andre Maurois

  Simple, Jargon, Philosopher

  "The Art of Writing". Book by Andre Maurois, 1960.

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• The usages and methods of warfare are thus determined by changing circumstances and, therefore, they themselves can in nowise be eternal.

  Leon Trotsky

  Warfare, Determined, Method

  Leon Trotsky (1969). “Marxism & military affairs, 1921-1924”

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• I still have trouble identifying grammatical structures by name, though I know them as matters of usage.

  Robertson Davies

  Names, Matter, Trouble

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• I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

  Joe Dante

  Character, Reality, Mind

  "24 hours of horror with Joe Dante". Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. October 31, 2012.

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• The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.

  Dennis Ritchie

  Aggravation, Javascript, Kind

  "The future according to Dennis Ritchie". Interview with Danny Kalev, www.itworld.com. December 20, 2000.

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• If men are discharged of reverence for ancient usage, they will treat this world, almost certainly, as if it were their private property, to be consumed for their sensual gratification; and thus they will destroy in their lust for enjoyment the property of future generations, of their own contemporaries, and indeed their very own capital.

  Russell Kirk

  Men, Lust, Sensual

  Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.44, Regnery Publishing

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• If somebody's in prison for non-violence, drug usage, and never committed a hard crime, they should be pardoned and let out.

  Ron Paul

  Drug, Violence, Prison

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• The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

  Ayn Rand

  Moral Development, Intellectual, Selfishness

  Ayn Rand (1964). “The Virtue of Selfishness”, p.7, Penguin

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