Vocabulary Quotes - Page 10

• In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

  Mary Wesley

  Friends, Important, My Best Friend

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• Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

  Yann Martel

  Love, Blessing, Qualms About

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice and Virgil”, p.23, Canongate Books

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• Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.

  Samuel Johnson

  Real, Class, Style

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey Into North Wales”, p.253

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• Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of a larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?

  Samuel Johnson

  Nice, Thinking, Differences

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1825). “The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: with Murphy's essay”, p.589

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• Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one's vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.

  Bergen Evans

  Reflection, Intellectual, Progress

  Bergen Evans (1963). “The word-a-day vocabulary builder”, Ballantine Books

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• We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.

  Steven Pinker

  Brain, Events, Shapes

  Steven Pinker (2010). “The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language”, p.1, Harper Collins

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• I'm interested in the way that the language of labor has been suppressed in our culture, the way it has disappeared from our vocabulary and is never heard on stage. . . . I'm better at writing than I am at organizing [political action]. SLAUGHTER CITY is my small contribution. If it gives people a voice it is worth something. So often we forget what we are no longer hearing.

  Naomi Wallace

  Writing, Cities, Voice

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• In the course of time I have learned to tramp about coral reefs, twenty to thirty feet under water, so unconcernedly that I can pay attention to particular definite things. But after all my silly fears have been allayed, even now, with eyes overflowing with surfeit of color, I am still almost inarticulate. We need a whole new vocabulary, new adjectives, adequately to describe the designs and colors of under sea.

  William Beebe

  Ocean, Silly, Eye

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• After a period in which technocrats attempted to become stars and stars to become politicians, the political void has been occupied by the force of mediocrity, which can easily master enough of the star techniques to produce inoffensive personalities and enough of the rational vocabulary to create the sounds of competence.

  John Ralston Saul

  Stars, Personality, Political

  John Ralston Saul (2013). “Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West”, p.532, Simon and Schuster

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• Every free minute away from dance (my main focus) I was memorizing new English words, either showering, walking or on the toilet. I started reading English books even though I had very limited vocabulary.

  Li Cunxin

  Book, Reading, Focus

  Source: tacdc.com.au

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• Yes, you can be a dreamer and a doer too, if you will remove one word from your vocabulary: impossible.

  Robert H. Schuller

  Motivational, Dream, Get Well

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• For at no time are any events predestined. There should be no such word in your vocabulary, for with every moment you change, and every heartbeat is an action, and every action changes every other action.

  Seth

  Events, Action, Moments

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• There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts…it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.

  David Coleman

  Art, Reading, Nuts

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• The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border.

  Amos Oz

  Israel, Ideas, Borders

  "Try a Little Tenderness". Haaretz Interview, March 17, 2000.

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• Genres give a vocabulary. They give a frame of reference for the audience to enter into a movie. Then, once they have their footing, that's when you can start doing things that they don't expect.

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  Giving, Genre, Audience

  "Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Writer/Director Rian Johnson Talk LOOPER, Sci-Fi, and Transforming into Bruce Willis". Interview, collider.com. March 19, 2012.

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• Journalism is one set of tools - one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.

  Michael Pollan

  Lenses, Tools, Journalism

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• When I draw it feels very natural - intuitive. I don't think about it, I just do it. My visual vocabulary is self-selecting and second nature to me. Writing is harder for me. It's something I struggle with. Drawing always comes first.

  Arthur Jones

  Struggle, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I would expunge the word "aptitude" from our vocabulary, because if you're interested in something, that's all that matters. You'll spend more time doing it, that than anything else, and possibly more time doing it than anybody else. And that's all that matters, because in the end, if you love what you do, you'll be your best at it compared to anything else you might have chosen as a career.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Careers, Aptitude, Might

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The word 'retirement' is not in my vocabulary right now.

  Charlie Daniels

  Retirement, Right Now

  Source: www.cbn.com

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• In my vocabulary, the word "compromise" is synonymous to the word "life".

  Amos Oz

  Compromise

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• Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.

  John Dewey

  Mean, Ordinary, Fundamentals

  John Dewey (2004). “Democracy and Education”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• I can get by and chatter and talk and tell funny stories, make people laugh, but I don't have as many words, I don't have the vocabulary. I think if I forced myself to read in Spanish - you know, I always say I'm going to, but I lose my patience reading in Spanish, because I really do read the way a third grader does, mouthing the words. That takes a long time!

  Sandra Cisneros

  Reading, Thinking, Laughing

  "Talking in Our Pajamas: A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros on Finding Your Voice, Fear of Highways, Tacos, Travel, and the Need for Peace in the World". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. 2008.

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• Fear is not a part of my vocabulary, actually.

  Alicia Keys

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Children, Book, Writing

  Madeleine L'Engle (2017). “The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention”, p.123, Open Road Media

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• The increasing technicality of the terminology employed is also a serious difficulty. It has become necessary to learn an extensive vocabulary before a book in even a limited department of science can be consulted with much profit. This change, of course, has its advantages for the initiated, in securing precision and concisement of statement; but it tends to narrow the field in which an investigator can labour, and it cannot fail to become, in the future, a serious impediment to wide inductive generalisations.

  Thomas George Bonney

  Book, Science, Fields

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