Way Quotes - Page 16

• Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.

  Edward de Bono

  Communication, Ignorance, Perception

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• By reading keep in a state of excited igorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself.Don't know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world.

  Mark Twain

  Children, Reading, Men

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• It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

  Mark Twain

  Hurt, Spring, Fall

  Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.3129, GENERAL PRESS

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• Now, neighbor confines, purge you of your scum! Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance, revel the night, rob, murder, and commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways?

  William Shakespeare

  Night, Scum, Ruffian

  1597-8 King Henry to Harry. Henry IV PartTwo, act 4, sc.3, l.254-5.

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• He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity - a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.

  Norman Douglas

  Mind, Atheism, Scylla

  Norman Douglas (2014). “South Wind”, p.166, Courier Corporation

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• He who is upright in his way of life and free from sin.

  Horace

  Integrity, Sin

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• The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

  Raymond Chandler

  Real, Clothes, Perfect

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.134, Univ of California Press

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• The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails - aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Long, Departed

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.63, David M Gross

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• If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Swag, Kind

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• Who is Mike Judge? Let me think. The only way I could possibly answer that question would be in a nonverbal fashion. I think I could do an interpretive dance that would answer that question for you.

  Mike Judge

  Dance, Fashion, Thinking

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• Body language is essential for an actress, even if you don't use your body in an athletic way. Just to be free, to use it like your voice. A body can be small and have incredible violence. A body talks.

  Anne Parillaud

  Voice, Athletic, Essentials

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• By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mean, Language, Description

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• LISP has jokingly been described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer." I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Intelligent, Thinking, Numbers

  "The Humble Programmer". Edsger Dijkstra's ACM Turing Award lecture, "Communications of the ACM", Volume 15, No. 10, www.cs.utexas.edu. October 1972.

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• Words slip into a language the way white-green vines slide between slats in a fence.

  Tim Seibles

  White, Vines, Green

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• There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Long, Age

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.107, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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• We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Perfect, Goal

  Noam Chomsky (1986). “Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use”, p.16, Greenwood Publishing Group

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• Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

  J. G. Ballard

  Fashion, Skulls, Heaven

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• The best way to learn is by doing; never ask others to do what you're not willing to do yourself.

  Ellen Sauerbrey

  Leadership, Willing, Asks

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• Surround yourself with the best people and then get out of their way. Give them a chance to exceed your expectations and they usually will.

  Anne Sweeney

  Leadership, People, Giving

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• Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Life, Philosophy, Work

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• The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.

  John Keats

  Life, Ambition, Character

  'Endymion' (1818) preface

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• The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.

  J. G. Ballard

  Life, Ideas, Confusion

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• The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

  George Santayana

  Life, Kindness, Philosophy

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• The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the American Way of Life is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.

  Eldridge Cleaver

  Life, Cutting, Swings

  ELDRIDGE CLEAVER (1968). “SOUL ON ICE”

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• A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable - or at least deserving of support.

  E. B. White

  Love, Country, Men

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