Usage Quotes

• English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

  E. B. White

  Communication, Luck, Taste And Judgment

  E. B. WHITE (1954). “The SECOND TREE from the CORNER”

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• Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

  Douglas Adams

  Safe, Strange, Awareness

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.35, Pan Macmillan

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• Look at growth, look at how much time people spend on the Net and look at the variety of things that they are doing. It's all really good, so I am actually encouraged by the fundamentals that underlie usage growth on the Net.

  Meg Whitman

  Business, Technology, People

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• What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Long, People, Host

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term.

  Harry Stack Sullivan

  Love, Satisfaction, Becoming

  Harry Stack Sullivan (1940). “Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry: The First William Alanson White Memorial Lectures”

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• Usage is the best language teacher.

  Quintilian

  Teacher, Language

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• The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

  Elizabeth Drew

  Sympathy, Gossip, Grace

  Elizabeth Drew (1964). “The Literature of Gossip”

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• I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

  Roland Barthes

  Passion, Mean, Thinking

  Mythologies "La Nouvelle Citroen" (1957) (translation by Annette Lavers)

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• Again, like I said, we're not trying to censor anyone. If you think drugs are cool, fine. Make that movie. We are not going to stop you, or try to stop you, but we would encourage other people to be a bit more responsible about their portrayal of drug usage.

  Gerald McRaney

  Thinking, People, Drug

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• One of the problems with sex education... is that it also strips kids - especially girls - of their modesty to have every detail of anatomy, physiology and condom usage made explicit.

  James Dobson

  Girl, Sex, Kids

  "Focus on the Family with Dr. James C. Dobson" by James C. Dobson, volumes 19-20, 1995.

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• If man did not exist as a world-spanning receptive realm of perception, if he were not engaged in this capacity, nothing at all could exist. 'Being,' in its traditional usage, means 'presence' and 'persistence.' To achieve presence, and thereby being, an entity requires some sort of open realm in which presence and persistence can take place. Thus an open realm of perception like that of human existence is the one being that makes being possible.

  Medard Boss

  Mean, Persistence, Men

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• The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Self Reliance, Force, Conform

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.263, Library of America

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• It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.

  A. E. van Vogt

  Break Up, Breakup, Interesting

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• Usage is like oxygen for ideas. That means every moment you're working on something without it being in the public it's actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.

  Matt Mullenweg

  Real, Mean, Oxygen

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• While self-interest arising from the enjoyment of meat eating is obviously one reason for its entrenchment, and inertia another, a process of language usage engulfs discussions about meat by constructing the discourse in such a way that these issues need never be addressed. Language distances us from the reality of meat eating, thus reinforcing the symbolic meaning of meat eating, a symbolic meaning that is intrinsically patriarchal and male-oriented. Meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there--patriarchal control of animals and of language.

  Carol J. Adams

  Distance, Reality, Animal

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• Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.

  Bram Cohen

  Thinking, Technology, Drug Use

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• I carried through well with my tennis. I got the respect by usage of the tennis racket.

  Gabriela Sabatini

  Sports, Respect, Tennis

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• I reject the word 'script' entirely-at any rate in the usual sense. I prefer the old usage-usually scenario-which it had in the Commedia dell'Arte, meaning an outline or scheme: it implies a dynamism, a number of ideas and principles from which one can set out to find the best possible approach to filming.

  Jacques Rivette

  Ideas, Numbers, Scripts

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• Before you judge me as some kind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it.

  Arika Okrent

  Judging, Funeral, Sound

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• Elasticsearch is all about scale for us. At Foursquare, we handle tens of millions of searches across 50 million locations each day. Elasticsearch returns real-time results, which encourages more usage and deeper engagement.

  Andrew Hogue

  Real, Return, Engagement

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• That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

  Ricky Jay

  Use, Way, Becoming

  Interview with Nathan Rabin, www.avclub.com. November 9, 2009.

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• To young men contemplating a voyage I would say go. The tales of rough usage are for the most part exaggerations, as also are the tales of sea danger. To face the elements is, to be sure, no light matter when the sea is in its grandest mood. You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over.

  Joshua Slocum

  Men, Light, Sea

  Joshua Slocum (1985). “The Voyages of Joshua Slocum”, p.381, Sheridan House, Inc.

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• If even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and drug rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to users could be dramatic.

  Milton Friedman

  Compassion, Punishment, Drug

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• Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Genius, Way, Manners

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.380

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• IMPALE, v.t. In popular usage, to pierce with any weapon which remains fixed in the wound . . . . properly, to put to death by thrusting an upright sharp stake into the body, the victim being left in a sitting position.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Death, Sitting, Body

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.98, 谷月社

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