Idiom Quotes

I believe that there is a silver lining in everything, and once you begin to see it, you’ll need sunglasses to combat the glare.

It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

If you do not know where your competitor is, or overconfident and snobbish about your competitor, or are unable to comprehend how yourcompetitor became a real threat, you will surely fall behind him. Don’t be the “they” in this idiom: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.

As far as the style, I can’t say there is one definite style. I probably feel most comfortable writing in a tonal idiom, with considerable, if not extreme chromaticism.

It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.

To make the bloody thing talk the way I do when I’m on a verbal roll, in my idioms and rhythms.

I like to mix and match things so I’m infusing a little bit of jazz, a little bit of classical, a little bit of soul, into the whole blues idiom and I’m coming up with something that I’m really interested in.

The style, often found difficult in the earlier books, is just as individual but more perfectly modulated to experience, and the dialogue is much closer to contemporary idiom, especially when those cadences have been masterfully twisted to satirical ends.

Nine times out of 10 when people do a tribute album or tribute songs for somebody, it’s what I call ‘white boys playing reggae’. They know they can’t, we know they can’t, so they sing like they can’t and play like they can’t. They gently make fun of the idiom or sing in a false accent.

A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.

You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line – all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

Unfortunately or fortunately, in order to become acquainted with the idiom of country or rock music, it is necessary to occasionally play in a bar. Bars are a rehearsal place.

My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.

I try to use the Australian idiom to its maximum advantage.

Idioms are a big thing in Ireland. They want to fill the time, to show how good they are at talk – it’s a talk-off

It’s a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It’s becoming quantized, diced and defined. It’s becoming an idiom. To me if it’s anything, jazz is a verb ? it’s more like a process than it is a thing.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

Whatever coast he’s on, a man should be himself. I don’t write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Do not put all your eggs in one basket.

The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in.

Many hands make light work.

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain.

Personally I feel that real rock ‘n’ roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, can you?

Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

It’s all through the actors; I cannot write in that idiom

[T]here is a methodological bias in favor of taking natural discourse literally, other things being equal. For example, unless there are clear reasons for construing discourse as ambiguous, elliptical, or involving special idioms, we should not so construe it.

When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal – ‘translatable’ into any cultural idiom.

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.

God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. Its the same in religion.

The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. “Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process ?

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It’s highly, highly polarised. It’s right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.

You cannot judge a book by its contents.

All that glitters is not gold.

What goes around, comes around.

French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.

There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love… In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.

Yes, but I view Frank’s music as fully composed. In other words, the arrangements can work for any idiom such as a rock band or an orchestra. Frank was a brilliant arranger and could make his music work in any context. He proved that tour after tour and album after album.

Pheromones are Earth’s primordial idiom.