Sentences Quotes - Page 10

• I dream of summing everything up in the greatest sentence ever written.

  Mason Cooley

  Dream, Existence, Written

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• When men comfort themselves with philosophy, 'tis not because they have got two or three sentences, but because they have digested those sentences, and made them their own: philosophy is nothing but discretion.

  John Selden

  Philosophy, Men, Two

  John Selden (1819). “Table talk: being the discourses of John Selden, esq”, p.129

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• People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but--" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the time would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.

  Robert Benchley

  People, May, Cracks

  Robert Benchley (1976). “Chips Off the Old Benchley”, Amereon Limited

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• If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.

  John Ruskin

  Perfection, May, Satisfaction

  John Ruskin (1854). “On the nature of Gothic architecture: and herein of the true functions of the workman in art. Being the greater part of the 6th chapter of the 2nd vol. of 'Stones of Venice'. [48 p.].”, p.19

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• Jail sentences have many functions, but one is surely to send a message about what our society abhors and what it values. This week, the equation was twofold: female infidelity twice as bad as male abuse, the life of a woman half as valuable as that of a man. The killing of the woman taken in adultery has a long history and survives today in many cultures. One of those is our own.

  Anna Quindlen

  Taken, Men, Law

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• The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Language, Interpretation, Grammar

  Noam Chomsky (2014). “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”, p.15, MIT Press

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• From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

  Noam Chomsky

  Elements, Language, Infinite

  Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.13, Walter de Gruyter

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• Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.

  Noam Chomsky

  Goal, Principles, Analysis

  Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.11, Walter de Gruyter

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• The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.

  Neil Postman

  Photography, Taken, Way

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.73, Penguin

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• That was how I was going to get things back to normal-by working. I never thought I would use the words “working” and “normal” in the same sentence, but I'll try anything to avoid facing reality.

  Gary Reilly

  Reality, Trying, Use

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• And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Party, Blow, Judging

  Thomas Hobbes (2016). “The Essential Leviathan: A Modernized Edition”, p.25, Hackett Publishing

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• In the complete overall history of tennis, I figure I'll be worth a sentence or two.... That's why my place in the all-time rankings means so very little to me, because I know I won't be anybody's number one, and it's that same old thing: if you're not number one, then what does it really matter?

  Billie Jean King

  Mean, Winning, Old Things

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• What will the greatest experiment discover? I have no idea!, maybe nothing!, If we won't check, we will never know. In science there is never a guarantee of success. If you understood this last sentence, then you understood the most important message of this lecture.

  Nathan Seiberg

  Science, Ideas, Important

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• All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

  Jacques Derrida

  Science, Missing, Ontology

  Jacques Derrida (2010). “Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography”, p.1977, Stanford University Press

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• We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter... [Language] is being eroded -- it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.

  Ralph Fiennes

  Two, Ease, World

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• Listening to the radio every day for an entire year was a prison sentence. It was the most depressing, annoying, debilitating project I have ever undertaken, and I have a master's degree in art history.

  Sarah Vowell

  Depressing, Art, Years

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• ...Poverty in America today leads not only to anxiety, unhappiness, discomfort and a lack of material goods. It leads to death. Poverty in America today is a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people.

  Bernie Sanders

  America, People, Anxiety

  "Is Poverty a Death Sentence?" by Sen. Bernie Sanders, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 13, 2011.

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• One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
  An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
  The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
  The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

  Kenneth Koch

  Dark, Next Day, One Day

  Kenneth Koch (2012). “On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988”, p.75, Knopf

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• The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Father, White, Hands

  Willard Van Orman Quine (1976). “The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays”, p.132, Harvard University Press

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• I was 40 before I learned that 'No' was a complete sentence.

  Kathy Ireland

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• The body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams.

  Hans Bellmer

  Real, Body, Anagrams

  Hans Bellmer, Stephen S. Prokopoff, Krannert Art Museum (1991). “Hans Bellmer, photographs: 23 February to 31 March 1991”

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• Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, “You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?” I can only reply, “The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. ‘Infinity,’ ‘truth,’ ‘beauty’—those are not numbers.

  John Derbyshire

  Beauty, Math, Numbers

  John Derbyshire (2003). “Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics”, p.21, Joseph Henry Press

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• When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary.

  Vivian Gornick

  Mind, Cafes, Adequate

  Vivian Gornick (1996). “Approaching Eye Level”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• My stand-up is more like how I am in real life. I don't really do a character thing in stand-up. It's just a bunch of sentences that are supposed to be funny.

  Zach Galifianakis

  Real, Character, Bunch

  "Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis Interview, Due Date". MoviesOnline Interview, www.moviesonline.ca. November, 2010.

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• Campaign analysts say that Dean has produced the most innovative web site in this year's presidential race. I particularly like today's blog, which consisted of the sentence 'I hate myself,' typed four billion times. In Dean's case, this may be the first instance where the actually entity represented by the web site has crashed more often than the site did.

  Dennis Miller

  Hate, Race, Years

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