Vocabulary Quotes

• Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation

  Robert Frost

  Art, Discipline, Firsts

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• Teaching vocabulary lists is inefficient - the time is better spent reading alone.

  Stephen D. Krashen

  Teaching, Reading, Lists

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• A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Men, Thinking, Together

  Henry Hazlitt, Hans F. Sennholz (1993). “The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt”, Foundation for Economic Education

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• One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Names, Needs, Literature

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• All I know is what I have words for.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Vocabulary Words, Knows

  "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". Book by Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1922.

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• Simply by changing your habitual vocabulary, you can instantaneously change how you think, how you feel, and how you live.

  Tony Robbins

  Thinking, How You Feel, Feels

  Tony Robbins (2012). “Awaken The Giant Within”, p.234, Simon and Schuster

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• Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.

  Aldous Huxley

  Play, Study, Enormous

  Aldous Huxley (1940). “Words and their meanings”

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• If children read 1 million words in a year, atl least 1,000 words will be added to their vocabulary.

  Stephen D. Krashen

  Children, Years, Ifs

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• The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies.

  Stephen Fry

  People, Swear, Knows

  "Stephen Fry: Guilty", 2007.

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• As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!

  Sheri S. Tepper

  Men, Numbers, Feelings

  Sheri S. Tepper (2011). “Plague of Angels”, p.189, Spectra

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• The last motive in the world for acquiring vocabulary should be to impress. Words should be acquired because we urgently need them - to convey, to reach, to express something within us, and to understand others.

  Vanna Bonta

  Needs, World, Lasts

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• I find vocabulary to be a great drawback.

  Elizabeth Taylor

  Language, Drawbacks

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• Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

  David Crystal

  Matter, Building, Wells

  "The History Of 7 Bizarre English Words" by David Crystal, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 27, 2012.

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• There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

  Anthony Burgess

  Earth, Flesh, Grammar

  Anthony Burgess (1964). “Language made plain”

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• Xenial' is a word which refers to the giving of gifts to strangers. . . . I know that having a good vocabulary doesn't guarantee that I'm a good person. . . . But it does mean I've read a great deal. And in my experience, well-read people are less likely to be evil.

  Daniel Handler

  Mean, Guarantees That, People

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• It's funny how certain objects convey a message - my washer and dryer, for example. They can't speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I'm doing fairly well. "No more laundromat for you," they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, "Well, he must be doing _something - _my numbers is off the charts." The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary, and says only one thing: "You are going to die."

  David Sedaris

  Skeletons, Numbers, Example

  "Memento Mori". www.newyorker.com. May 8, 2006.

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• If you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary.

  Michel Thomas

  Verbs, Language, Handle

  "Speak French with Michel Thomas" by Michel Thomas, Disc 5, March 29, 2001.

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• A German psychologist says that women talk more than men because they have a bigger vocabulary. But, it evens out because men only listen half the time.

  Jay Leno

  Men, Half, Psychologist

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• Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

  Milan Kundera

  Together, Too Late, Lovers

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• People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multihued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.

  Tony Robbins

  Motivational, Emotional, Color

  Tony Robbins (2007). “Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial”, p.201, Simon and Schuster

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• In his head, his mother said, 'People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper'.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Mother, People, Said

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• Happiness is so rarely a part of my vocabulary, because for me it's so fleeting

  David Levithan

  Fleeting

  David Levithan (2013). “Every Day”, p.15, Egmont UK

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• There is something in the quality of the French mind to which I have always felt a reluctant kinship. They are the only people I know who can leap into an enormous vocabulary of words and beat them up with the wings of their spirit into a fine hysterical eloquence.

  Corra May Harris

  Wings, People, Mind

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• You can't build a vocabulary without reading. You can't meet friends if you ... stay at home by yourself all the time. In the same way, you can't build up a vocabulary if you never meet any new words. And to meet them you must read. The more you read the better.

  Rudolf Flesch

  Reading, Home, Way

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• A vocabulary of truth and simplicity will be of service throughout your life.

  Winston Churchill

  Simplicity, Simple Life, Simple Living

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