Vocabulary Quotes - Page 6

• One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.

  Seth Godin

  Voice, People, Reason

  "Inside Seth Godin's Blogging Philosophy". Interview with Josh Bernoff, adage.com. July 13, 2009.

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• Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we're reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can't even talk or think about it directly.

  Diane Ackerman

  Passion, Fighting, Love Is

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of Love: Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses”, p.19, Vintage

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• The term 'laity' is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.

  Karl Barth

  Christian, Conversation, Worst

  Karl Barth (1986). “A Karl Barth Reader”, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

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• Human language has a vocabulary suited to our daily needs and functions: the shape of any human language maps approximately to the needs and activities of our mundane lives. But few would deny that there is another dimension of human existence which transcends the mundane: call it the soul, the spirit: it is that part of the human frame which sees the shimmer of the numinous.

  Julian Burnside

  Communication, Media, Soul

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• What is comfortable fashion? To be comfortable, that can't be in the vocabulary of fashion. If you want to be comfortable, stay home in your pajamas.

  Donatella Versace

  Fashion, Home, Want

  Interview with Nicki Minaj, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 28, 2011.

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• Cults use our vocabulary, but they don't use our dictionary.

  Charles R. Swindoll

  Use, Cult, Dictionary

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• I love ballet. Ballet is its own being. It has its own vocabulary. I feel as if I am in a different world when I am in the ballet studio.

  Kiernan Shipka

  Ballet, Different, World

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Writers that pretend to be in the throes of some kind of genius-demon, some kind of possessing spirit that refuses to let them engage with Normal Life are bullshit artists of the highest degree, looking to excuse their antisocial tendencies and bad manners away with a flourish of vocabulary and the semantic waving of hands.

  Matt Fraction

  Artist, Hands, Bullshit

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

  Tom Waits

  Appreciation, Thinking, Musician

  "Tom Waits: 'I'm a night-owl reporter' - a classic interview from the vaults". Interview with Richard Cromelin, www.theguardian.com. August 7, 2012.

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• The word beauty is unavoidable … it accounts for my decision to photograph … There appeared a quality, beauty seemed the only appropriate word for it, in certain photographs, and I am compelled to live with the vocabulary of this new sight … through over many years [I] still find it embarrassing to use the word beauty, I fear I will be attacked for it, but I still believe in it.

  Robert Adams

  Believe, Sight, Years

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• I feel as though I am trying to describe a three-dimensional experience while living in a two-dimension world. The appropriate words, descriptions, and concepts don't even exist in our current language. I have subsequently read the accounts of other people's near-death experiences and their portrayals of heaven and I am able to see the same limitations in their descriptions and vocabulary that I see in my own.

  Mary C. Neal

  God, Christian, Religious

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• There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.

  Annie Dillard

  Work, Skills, Vision

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.150, Canongate Books

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• In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Rivalry, Connotation, Should

  "Kafka and His Precursors" (1951) (translation by James E. Irby)

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• Practice the vocabulary of love - unlearn the language of hate and contempt.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Hate, Practice, Language

  FaceBook post by Sri Sathya Sai Baba from Jan 10, 2017

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• In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential.

  Robert Motherwell

  Wine, Mean, Simple

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• To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation.

  Yves Klein

  Communication, Soul, Explaining

  Sidra Stich, Yves Klein, Hayward Gallery, Museum Ludwig, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany) (1994). “Yves Klein”

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• Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

  John Charles Polanyi

  Powerful, Nice, Giving

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• I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself... That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.

  Joan Miro

  Discovery, Different, Vineyards

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• I was never nervous. That's not me, ... Nervousness, scariness, that's not even in our vocabulary.

  Vince Young

  Nervous, Nervousness

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• Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities... Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist's statements.

  Robert Genn

  Writing, Artist, Style

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• We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

  Steve Jobs

  Mean, Men, People

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• The purpose of all of this is not to walk around with new vocabulary words, but to cause you to speculate on the marvel of your own being.

  Frederick Lenz

  Inspirational, Buddhism, Purpose

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