Vocabulary Quotes - Page 18

• I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Culture, Pity, Abstract

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1920). “Modes and Morals”

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• To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.

  Anton Chekhov

  Drinking, Cynical, Literature

  Letter to N.A. Leikin, December 24, 1886.

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• [Ritual] dwells in an invisible reality and gives this reality a vocabulary, props, costume, gesture, scenery. Ritual makes things separate, sets them apart from ordinary affairs and thoughts. Rituals need not be solemn, but they are formalized, stylized, extraordinary, and artificial. In the name of ritual, we can do anything. We can do astonishing acts. In the end, ritual gives us assurance about the unification of things.

  Barbara Myerhoff

  Reality, Names, Giving

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• I decided that I wanted to explore all kinds of music with my cello, not just the Western classical tradition. I just wanted to try and expand my vocabulary and bring that different kind of music to my audience.

  Maya Beiser

  Trying, Different, Kind

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• Ahimsa is a science. The word 'failure' has no place in the vocabulary of science.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Ahimsa

  Mahatma Gandhi (1967). “The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi”, p.128, Rajpal & Sons

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• One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Thinking, Issues, Tvs

  Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

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• When it comes to my vocabulary, I felt a responsibility when I was teaching to raise the bar of conversation in my classroom. And with my own students, I refused to let them use the phrase "I like" or "I don't like" when we were engaged in a critique.

  Tim Gunn

  Teaching, Responsibility, Bars

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. February 11, 2014.

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• I think that it's not a bad thing to not be too versed in the vocabulary of cinema, because you start to think that certain things are allowed and not allowed.

  Steven Knight

  Thinking, Cinema, Certain

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Would Be, Embrace

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.209, Harvard University Press

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• Once a term like "open source" entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about "innovation" and "progress," not "accountability" or "security."

  Evgeny Morozov

  Accountability, Innovation, Progress

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• I'm learning all the right vocabulary words - 'You're right, I'm wrong.'

  George Stephanopoulos

  Vocabulary Words

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• We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.

  Albert Camus

  Heart, Loss, Exercise

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• There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Stories, Said, Allowing

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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• Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.

  Richard Rorty

  Truth Is, Made, Existence

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.21, Cambridge University Press

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• Technology is a vocabulary and a language in which you can say many things.

  Santiago Calatrava

  Technology, Language

  Source: www.archdaily.com

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• Sometimes I see my students, especially the ones with a gift for the lyrical, reaching far outside the realm of their own experience for language and images. I understand this impulse. We think, in the beginning, that striking exotic words together will create something entirely new. That we must be worldly in our vocabulary. We idolize the styles of other writers and don't trust or perhaps yet know our own.

  Melissa Febos

  Thinking, Style, Together

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The pope [Francis] takes his vocabulary from his pastoral experience, not from the rhetorical tool kit of liberation theology, with its Marxist yammering about "center" and "periphery." The "peripheries," for Francis, are all those who have fallen through the cracks of late-modernity and post-modernity - in his native Argentina, because of colossal corruption, political and financial.

  George Weigel

  Political, Argentina, Cracks

  Source: eppc.org

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• When we start making distinctions between soul and spirit, we're in very, very murky waters. There is the whole issue of the English language, which has a rather limited vocabulary when it comes to psychological descriptions, not to speak of spiritual descriptions. We're good mythically - the English language is superb for myth. But we're not very good for psychology or spirituality.

  Jean Houston

  Spiritual, Issues, Water

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• I'm a computer freak. I'm on the Internet every night. Sometimes I play dungeons and dragons with 15-year-old boys who think I'm a 15-year-old boy with a weird vocabulary.

  Jean Houston

  Thinking, Boys, Night

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• As a filmmaker, "no" is not in my vocabulary. I've got to figure out a way.

  Taylor Hackford

  Way, Figures, Filmmaker

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• . I did an interview earlier and somebody asked me if I [knew I] was onto something back when I was first writing. I said, "Yeah. I always thought I was good." We're not the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or AC/DC. But Helmet always sounded like Helmet, and we sort of developed our own sound. There's a vocabulary that's kind of universal now that's very simple. My friendDavid Sims, [the bassist] in Jesus Lizard, said, "I wish I'd thought of it." When you first hear it, it's like, "Oh duh." But that's cool.

  Page Hamilton

  Jesus, Writing, Simple

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• One of the problems I see with these comics on television, particularly cable television, is, since you can say anything in terms of sex and scatological references and so on, therefore, you should do it. So they all limit themselves to these subjects and this vocabulary. My objection is that it is a lack of articulateness. Irreverence is easy, but what is hard is wit. Wit is what these comedians lack.

  Tom Lehrer

  Sex, Comedian, Say Anything

  Sydney Morning Herald interview, www.smh.com.au. March 1, 2003.

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• Certainly we must be strong, but strength is, to me, not just a force, but rather a vocabulary of many means

  Doris Humphrey

  Strong, Mean, Force

  Doris Humphrey (1959). “The art of making dances”

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• The language of the culture also reflects the stories of the culture. One word or simple phrasal labels often describe the story adequately enough in what we have termed culturally common stories. To some extent, the stories of a culture are observable by inspecting the vocabulary of that culture. Often entire stories are embodied in one very culture-specific word. The story words unique to a culture reveal cultural differences.

  Roger Schank

  Unique, Simple, Differences

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• I need to get a greater vocabulary than what I have and when I get mad and my brain searches for a word. I have to find different words and to do that you need to have more of an education.

  Duane Chapman

  Mad, Brain, Different

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