Vocabulary Quotes - Page 15

• I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

  Jack Gilbert

  Dream, Might, Lost

  Jack Gilbert (2013). “The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992”, p.11, Knopf

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• Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

  Thomas Szasz

  Expectations, Political, Intellectual

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.27, Syracuse University Press

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• Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

  Jonathan Raban

  Art, Real, Men

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• Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region.

  Israel Shenker

  Quality, Syntax, Earth

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• I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.

  James Salter

  Powerful, Tired, Ice

  James Salter, Robert Phelps (2010). “Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps”, p.25, Counterpoint Press

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• Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greates results in business and career if you drop the word 'achievement' from your vocabulary and replace it with 'contribution'.

  Peter Drucker

  Careers, Achievement, Odd

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• I have a vocabulary all my own. I "pass the time" when it is wet and disagreeable. When it is fine I do not wish to pass it; I ruminate it and hold on to it. We should hasten over the bad, and settle upon the good.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Time, Self, Wish

  Michel de Montaigne (1946). “The essays”

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• English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. Its the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning.

  Richard Lederer

  Latin, Way, Language

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• My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation.

  Carol Gilligan

  Men, Self, Different

  Carol GILLIGAN (2009). “In a Different Voice”, p.131, Harvard University Press

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• Let us pray for ourselves, that we may not lose the word “concern” out of our Christian vocabulary. Let us pray for our nation. Let us pray for those who have never known Jesus Christ and redeeming love, for moral forces everywhere, for our national leaders. Let prayer be our passion. Let prayer be our practice.

  Robert E. Lee

  Christian, Jesus, Prayer

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• Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

  Paula Fox

  War, Reality, Thinking

  Paula Fox (2011). “News from the World: Stories and Essays”, p.150, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman

  Character, Adjectives, Amusing

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1850). “The optimist”, p.79

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• when Christian theology becomes traditionalism and men fail to hold and use it as they do a living language, it becomes an obstacle, not a help to religious conviction. To the greatest of the early Fathers and the great scholastics theology was a language which, like all language, had a grammar and a vocabulary from the past, but which they used to express all the knowledge and experience of their own time as well.

  Lily Dougall

  Christian, Religious, Father

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• I think Hemingway's [book] titles should be awarded first prize in any contest. Each of them is a poem, and their mysterious power over readers contributes to Hemingway's success. His titles have a life of their own, and they have enriched the American vocabulary.

  Sylvia Beach

  Book, Thinking, Titles

  Sylvia Beach (1991). “Shakespeare and Company”, p.83, U of Nebraska Press

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• White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.

  Joni Mitchell

  White, Spirit, March

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• The citizen is becoming a pawn in a game where nobody knows the rules, where everybody consequently doubts that there are rules at all, and where the vocabulary has been diminished to such an extent that nobody is even sure what the game is all about.

  Andrew Eldritch

  Games, Doubt, Citizens

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• I know that some subjective experiences of sex are very firm and fundamental, even unchangeable. They can be so firm and unchanging that we call them "innate". But given that we report on such a sense of self within a social world, a world in which we are trying to use language to express what we feel, it is unclear what language does that most effectively. I understand that "innate" is a word that conveys the sense of something hired-wired and constitutive. I suppose I would be inclined to wonder whether other vocabularies might do the job equally well.

  Judith Butler

  Jobs, Sex, Self

  Source: transadvocate.com

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• The French have no such expression as 'killing time.' In their more philosophical vocabulary the term is 'passing time,' which means savoring all moments of it each to his individual enjoyment. While we battle with time, they relax with tempo.

  Cornelia Otis Skinner

  Time, Philosophical, Mean

  Cornelia Otis Skinner (1985). “Bottoms up!”

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• Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Stones, Steel, Architecture

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• Appetites have only one word in their vocabulary - MORE. Appetites are never fully and finally satisfied. Even after the most satisfying meal imaginable, we eventually find ourselves rummaging through the pantry for a snack.

  Andy Stanley

  Snacks, Meals, Appetite

  Source: paulsohn.org

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• Scripture is the thing I like to share with people more than anything. My prayer reality is quite kooky. I have this very unique dialogue with the Lord. I utilize my own sort of street vocabulary - nothing slang that would be unacceptable.

  Stephen Baldwin

  Prayer, Unique, Reality

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• The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.

  Kenneth E. Iverson

  Mind, Important, Tools

  "Notation as a Tool of Thought". Cvommunications of the ACM, 23 (8), (pp. 444 - 465), August 1980.

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• Equity, ownership, production fees, license fees: those are the vocabulary words that are exciting to me.

  Ryan Seacrest

  Vocabulary Words, Ownership, Fees

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• Failure was not an option. It just wasn't in my vocabulary.

  Hilary Devey

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• Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.

  Ellen Goodman

  Caring, Rights, Choices

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