Usage Quotes - Page 4

• Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Mean, Men, Views

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964). “Signs”, p.77, Northwestern University Press

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• I'm coming back to what you said about seeing and listening and hearing. I had to think of a remark that I heard yesterday, somebody came and said ' I saw you concert' Can we change the usage of, of this phrase please? And I hope that some of the people in our concert tonight will listen and even hear what we are doing!

  Alfred Brendel

  Thinking, Yesterday, People

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• A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him.

  Edward Sapir

  Simplicity, Analysis, Helping

  Edward Sapir, Pierre Swiggers (2008). “General Linguistics”, p.280, Walter de Gruyter

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• To assume that wealth or sexuality or the usage of power, any of these things are not void in nature, gives them a reality they don't actually have.

  Frederick Lenz

  Success, Buddhism, Reality

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• Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things simply: happen: to people, rather than be being caused by their own choices and behavior. Thus there is said to be an 'epidemic' of teenage pregnancy, or of drug usage, as if these things were like the flu that people catch just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Thomas Sowell

  Teenage, Pregnancy, Epidemics

  Thomas Sowell (1995). “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”, p.198, Basic Books

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• "Agnostic" is a much more recent word than "atheist", coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869 to mean "without knowledge of God" and acquiring the usage of "being doubtful about the existence of God."

  Jim Herrick

  Atheist, Mean, Atheism

  Jim Herrick (1985). “Against the Faith: Essays on Deists, Skeptics, and Atheists”

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• The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?).

  Herman Melville

  Heart, Men, Thinking

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.4894, Delphi Classics

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• I have never witnessed on any previous occasion such entire disregard of the usage of civilized warfare and the dictates of humanity.

  Robert E. Lee

  War, Humanity, Disregard

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• Obviously, if theism is a belief in a God and atheism is a lack of a belief in a God, no third position or middle ground is possible. A person can either believe or not believe in a God. Therefore, our previous definition of atheism has made an impossibility out of the common usage of agnosticism to mean "neither affirming nor denying a belief in God."

  Gordon Stein

  Believe, Mean, Atheism

  Gordon Stein (1980). “An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism”

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• Own one idea. Complete it. Map the current model of purchase and usage. Change how it is done so at least some part of the market uses only your product. Extend from that core user to a much broader universe. Describe your concept in a very short, "six-word story" - a la Ernest Hemingway: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

  Michael J. Silverstein

  Baby, Shoes, Ideas

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Phrases, Tests, Easy

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• conventional English usage, including the generic use of masculine-gender words, often obscures the actions, the contributions, and sometimes the very presence of women. Turning our backs on that insight is an option, of course, but it is an option like teaching children that the world is flat.

  Casey Miller

  Children, Teaching, Use

  Casey Miller, Kate Swift (2001). “The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing”, p.8, iUniverse

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• I have just learned a delicious French usage. On wedding invitations when they say the mass is at noon they mean one o'clock -when they say at noon precise they mean half after twelve - and when they say at very precisely noon they mean noon.

  Alice B. Toklas

  Mean, Twelve, Noon

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• Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.

  Clive James

  Grateful, Style, Enemy

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• When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.

  N.D. Wilson

  Giving, Creative, Lapses

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• My role is to find strategic insights as to where design can have the most business impact. A designer can bring a viewpoint of not just aesthetics, but economics and usage.

  John Maeda

  Impact, Design, Roles

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• Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape...if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.

  Arthur Quinn

  House, Speech, Ordinary

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• No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service - from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly. That's systems thinking.

  Donald A. Norman

  Reflection, Thinking, Islands

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• If thou wouldst hear what seemly is and fit, inquire of noble woman; they can tell, who in life's common usage hold their place by graceful deed and aptly chosen word.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Women, Deeds, Noble

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Stuart Blackie (1883). “The Wisdom of Goethe”, Edinburgh, W. Blackwood

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• All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Action, Forget, Spontaneity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.210, Penguin

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• Brass shines with constant usage, a beautiful dress needs wearing,Leave a house empty, it rots.

  Ovid

  Beautiful, House, Shining

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• Will biofuel usage require land? Absolutely, but we think the ability to use winter cover crops, degraded land, as well as using sources such as organic waste, sewage, and forest waste means that actual land usage will be limited. Just these sources can replace most of our imported oil by 2030 without touching new land.

  Vinod Khosla

  Mean, Winter, Thinking

  "Power Q&A: Vinod Khosla". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. April 21, 2008.

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• First, the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia, by providing that the militia shall always be kept well organized, armed, and disciplined, and include, according to the past and general usuage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms; and that all regulations tending to render this general militia useless and defenceless, by establishing select corps of militia, or distinct bodies of military men, not having permanent interests and attachments in the community to be avoided.

  Patrick Henry

  Military, Past, Men

  "Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer", 169, 1788.

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• The sea, as well as the air, is a free and common thing to all; and a particular nation cannot pretend to have the right to the exclusion of all others, without violating the rights of nature and public usage.

  Elizabeth I

  Freedom, Rights, Air

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• The usage of the words "public" and "public sphere" betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.

  Jurgen Habermas

  Confused, Historical, Employment

  "Space, Place, and Environmental Ethics". Book by Andrew Light, 1997.

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