Idiom Quotes - Page 4

• French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.

  Peter Medawar

  Philosophy, Prose Poetry, Use

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.2, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.

  Linton Kwesi Johnson

  Voice, Resistance, Spirit

  "Trust between the police and the black community is still broken" by Linton Kwesi Johnson, www.theguardian.com.

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• Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal - 'translatable' into any cultural idiom.

  Nancy Pearcey

  People, Christianity, Indigenous

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• When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

  Jim Woodring

  Character, America, Ties

  Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. July 8, 2010.

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• A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Latin, Real

  George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison (2001). “Orwell and politics: Animal farm in the context of essays, reviews and letters selected from the complete works of George Orwell”, Penguin Modern Classics

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• Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.

  Richard Rosen

  Understanding, Frozen, Jargon

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• If you do not know where your competitor is, or overconfident and snobbish about your competitor, or are unable to comprehend how yourcompetitor became a real threat, you will surely fall behind him. Don't be the "they" in this idiom: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

  Jack Ma

  Leadership, Business, Real

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• Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.

  Thomas Szasz

  Confused, Men, Race

  "Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry". Book by Thomas Szasz and Karl Kraus (p. 67), March 1, 1990.

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• [T]here is a methodological bias in favor of taking natural discourse literally, other things being equal. For example, unless there are clear reasons for construing discourse as ambiguous, elliptical, or involving special idioms, we should not so construe it.

  Tyler Burge

  Philosophical, Special, Favors

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• I have to admit that more and more lately, the whole idea of jazz as an idiom is one that I've completely rejected. I just don't see it as an idiomatic thing any more...To me, if jazz is anything, it's a process, and maybe a verb, but it's not a thing. It's a form that demands that you bring to it things athat are valuable to you, that are personal to you. That, for me, is a pretty serious distinction that doesn't have anything to do with blues, or swing, or any of these other things that tend to be listed as essentials in order for music to be jazz with a capital J.

  Pat Metheny

  Swings, Order, Ideas

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• Nine times out of 10 when people do a tribute album or tribute songs for somebody, it's what I call 'white boys playing reggae'. They know they can't, we know they can't, so they sing like they can't and play like they can't. They gently make fun of the idiom or sing in a false accent.

  David Lee Roth

  Song, Fun, Boys

  "Roth still 'Runnin' with the Devil' on bluegrass tribute". John Gerome, The Associated Press, June 5, 2006.

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• From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes , a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity.

  John Galt

  Character, Scotland, Two

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• For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

  James Fenton

  Art, Vanity, Hands

  "An Introduction to English Poetry". Book by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. June 15, 2002.

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• The style, often found difficult in the earlier books, is just as individual but more perfectly modulated to experience, and the dialogue is much closer to contemporary idiom, especially when those cadences have been masterfully twisted to satirical ends.

  Geoffrey Dutton

  Book, Style, Cadence

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• You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

  Nick Clegg

  Blue, Media, Political

  "A year in the eye of the storm". Interview with Andrew Rawnsley, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2011.

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• The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Sea, Decipher

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• I like to mix and match things so I'm infusing a little bit of jazz, a little bit of classical, a little bit of soul, into the whole blues idiom and I'm coming up with something that I'm really interested in.

  Gino Vannelli

  Soul, Littles, Jazz

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• It's all through the actors; I cannot write in that idiom

  Woody Allen

  Writing, Actors

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• Beaumont specifically pointed out that the cultural elements and idioms regarded as "Egyptian" could not have originated in the land of the Nile. This single fact is inviolate and cannot be denied. It is obvious to those who have taken the time to study the subject, that the Egyptian civilization was transplanted by Western adepts and elders.

  Michael Tsarion

  Taken, Land, Civilization

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• Music is a manifestation of the human spirit, similar to language. Its greatest practitioners have conveyed to mankind things not possible to say in any other language. If we do not want these things to remain dead treasures, we must do our utmost to make the greatest possible number of people understand their idiom.

  Zoltan Kodaly

  Inspirational, Music, Numbers

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• Idioms are a big thing in Ireland. They want to fill the time, to show how good they are at talk - it's a talk-off

  Dylan Moran

  Want, Bigs, Shows

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• It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing.

  Pat Metheny

  Verbs, Fruit, Becoming

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