Vocabulary Quotes

Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual, ideas of their art.

Tired is not a word in my vocabulary.

The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.

My mother was a very literate person who had educated herself. She had an exceptional vocabulary.

In my own case, I’m an artist, and I’m really interested in expanding the vocabulary of human action, and basically empowering people through interactivity. I want people to discover themselves as actors, as creative actors, by having interactive experiences.

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That’s terribly important, especially for a writer.

If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.

It’s not really about confidence. It’s just something that isn’t really in the vocabulary of what goes on at work. The writers write and the actors act.

I’m interested in visual vocabulary, like Warhol was interested in that vocabulary of advertisements and television and pop culture.

Remove ‘can’t’, ‘won’t’ and ‘shouldn’t’ from your vocabulary when they restrict attainment. Persevere if you truly believe your cause is just.

If you think about portraying Americans, for example, in a Russian film, it all depends on where the American is from, if they went to school or not, and if they’re well-educated or not. Is it an American from Texas, or an American from Brooklyn? Things would change with the vocabulary and the accent.

It’s advice I always give to directors when they’re starting out: Take an acting class to really see what it feels like to be an actor. And I have always felt like one of my strengths as a director is that I share a language and a vocabulary with actors.

The word ‘midget’ is a slur. It evolved from P. T. Barnum’s era of circuses and freak shows. Society has evolved. So should our vocabulary. Language is a powerful tool. It does not just name our society. It shapes it.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

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.

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.

Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over.

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

We are writing stories with light and darkness, motion and colors. It is a language with its own vocabulary and unlimited possibilities for expressing our inner thoughts and feelings.

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

The term ‘too big to fail’ must be excised from our vocabulary.

On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites’ emphasis on words such as ‘connection,’ ‘community,’ and ‘choice.’ Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference.

There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God–a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.

When I’m looking for a leader who’s gonna sit across the negotiating table from a nuclear Iran, or who’s gonna be intent on destroying ISIS, I couldn’t care less about that leader’s temperament or his tone or his vocabulary. Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find.

I find vocabulary to be a great drawback.

Compassion is not a dirty word.. it’s time we rehabilitated compassion into the national political vocabulary of this great nation of ours.

Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities… Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist’s statements.

I decided that I wanted to explore all kinds of music with my cello, not just the Western classical tradition. I just wanted to try and expand my vocabulary and bring that different kind of music to my audience.

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.

Although the language of North Korea and South Korea is similar, there are big differences in the vocabulary.

One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.

I got Cs in English at school. I hated it. But now I want to be a writer and I’m voracious for new vocabulary and new ideas.

My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.

Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.

For me, a dancer is part of an artist’s entertainment – “backup dancer” isn’t even in my vocabulary.

The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.

Retirement is not in my vocabulary.

Words are not even within me. They’re not in my vocabulary to really express the kind of feeling that I had.

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don’t need any fingers.

Read, read, read. Read good books. You will strengthen your understanding of story. Your vocabulary will be the richer for it.

Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.

Actors always feel more comfortable when there’s an actor directing, in terms of vocabulary and breaking down a scene.

At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.

I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable.

Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.

Humor is not far from my vocabulary.

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There’s something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.

I’ve learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.

A picture book is a motorcycle: small, loud, fun, and zippy.
An easy reader is a chartered bus: obliged to carry a rather dull passenger roster of sanctioned curriculum, plus the baggage of an approved, limited vocabulary. The trick is to design your chartered bus to be as cool and sexy as a motorcycle.

I was never nervous. That’s not me, … Nervousness, scariness, that’s not even in our vocabulary.

My vocabulary is vast and expert, and I don’t think I overuse any word.

The sole forms of social interaction I was aware of as a kid involved a jungle gym and a sticker book. It was only in high school that ICQ – a prehistoric form of instant messaging – was first incorporated into my cultural vocabulary.

The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.

A lot of people in film run around with a facade and use the right vocabulary and think they’re mental giants, but it’s very limiting.

They say, ‘Nothing can be done here!’ I reply, ‘I know no such word in the vocabulary I adopt!’

Practice the vocabulary of love – unlearn the language of hate and contempt.

We can shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision.

Over the course of several articles, I will give you the tools to become a sentence connoisseur as well as a sentence artisan. Each of my lessons will give you the insight to appreciate fine sentences and the vocabulary to talk about them.

In a way, light unites the spiritual world and the ephemeral, physical world. People frequently talk about spiritual experiences using the vocabulary of light: Saul on the road to Damascus, near-death experiences, samadhi or the light-filled void of Buddhist enlightenment.

I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance.

The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work.

I studied one term of law and then came to realize I had a little better fastball and curve than I did a vocabulary.

Threats are the last resort of a man with no vocabulary.

Everything is organic. I got the wordplay, I got the vocabulary to really, really rap.

I really was the nerd in the car that read vocabulary books. If we were going on day trips, I would quite like to have just stayed in the car with my German and French vocab books. It’s embarrassing to admit to it now.

I like a woman who has a vocabulary larger than ‘shoes’ and ‘handbags.’ But a nice pair of legs to go in the shoes is always good, too.

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.

‘I can’t’ are two words that have never been in my vocabulary. I believe in me more than anything in this world.

Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that’s new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world – block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary.

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.

One of your first jobs, as you write for money, will be to get rid of your vocabulary.

The school-boy doesnt force himself to learn his vocabularies and rules altogether at night, but knows that be must impress them again in the morning.

The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be ‘materialistic’ and ‘greedy’ to want to keep what you have earned. But it is ‘idealistic’ to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.

I preferred the simplest vocabulary.

There are very few religious experiences that aren’t explained using the vocabulary of light.

When I was in fourth grade, we were learning vocabulary words, and the word nonconformist came up. The teacher said, “It’s somebody who whatever everybody is doing, they do the opposite.” I remember raising my hand and saying, “Mrs. Christiansen, I would like to be a nonconformist.”

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

When I write a poem, I do not have to worry about using a higher Urdu vocabulary because I know the reader knows Urdu well.

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.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

If scientists could communicate more in their own voices – in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary – would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?

We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community’s vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.

I’m not a great reader, believe it or not. It’s not the vocabulary – my father made me read the dictionary when I was little – but my attention span is poor. Takes me months to read one book.

Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly.

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.

Just because I have a good vocabulary, I don’t think of myself as anachronistic – just because I try not to use the word ‘like’ every other word.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

Vocabulary spills I’m ill.

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.

I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It’s a metaphor for women’s lives, their creativity.

I need to get a greater vocabulary than what I have and when I get mad and my brain searches for a word. I have to find different words and to do that you need to have more of an education.

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

I don’t swear much; I’ve taken those words out of my vocabulary, and having kids, you have to have two sets of language!

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

Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

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.

I think one of the things helping Donald Trump is, he hasn’t known what he can’t do. It’s not in his vernacular. It’s not in his vocabulary. It’s not in his way of thinking what he can’t do, what you’re not supposed to do.

The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border.

Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank.

When I’d written my ‘Silverwing’ series – I’d imbued the bats with full human awareness and vocabulary.

With guitar, I’d always mixed more sounds that occur in hip-hop, or occur on Crystal Method records, or occur at the zoo – so I’ve never been sort of tethered or have limited myself to the traditional rock n’ roll vocabulary.

Risk isn’t a word in my vocabulary. It’s my very existence.

As photographers, we have to find our own identity, our own voice, our own vocabulary. And my question all the time is whether this vocabulary is limited, like our own vocabulary that goes from A to Zed, or whether this vocabulary can carry on growing. And to me, I hope that it carries on growing.

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.

Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps – their syntax, idiom, vocabulary – are the stuff of stage dancing.

If ‘gay’ is not in your vocabulary, if being gay is not an option in your world, then you’re far more likely to see your kid as anything but gay.

I remember at school one day there was a vocabulary list on the chalkboard, and the word ‘nonconformist’ was on there, and it said, ‘Someone that doesn’t appeal to society, someone who doesn’t fit in.’ We had this whole conversation about it, and I realized it cohered to the punk-rock world that I was into.

To see yourself on the big screen, you’re big, you hate your voice, your vocabulary. You say the same words, you speak bad.

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

It is said that the American vocabulary has declined by half in the past few decades. It’s a tragic instance of desertification following upon monocultural commodity production, the clear-cutting of written and spoken English.

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Technology is a vocabulary and a language in which you can say many things.

Failure isn’t an option. I’ve erased the word ‘fear’ from my vocabulary, and I think when you erase fear, you can’t fail.

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.

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.

I see someone play, or I listen to a record, and I think, “How did they make that sound?’ It’s not emulation; it’s more building a vocabulary that can be called up at a moment’s notice.

I just think that the question of women in rock or women playing guitar, I just think it’s such a non-issue, and I think that probably the sooner critics and press outlets can just erase the ‘what’s it like being a women in rock?’ question from their vocabulary, the better off everyone will be.

Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

If children haven’t been read to, they don’t love books. They need to love books, for books are the basis of literature, composition, history, world events, vocabulary, and everything else.

I remove the work should from my vocabulary forever. Should is a word that makes a prisoner of me. Every time I say should, I am making myself wrong, or I am making someone else wrong. I am, in effect, saying I am not good enough.

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!

Playing nice isn’t really something that’s in my vocabulary. I just do what I think is right.

Journalism is one set of tools – one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.

I think there is no future whatsoever in 3D. It does nothing to the grammar and syntax or vocabulary of cinema. And you get fed up with it in exactly 3 minutes.

English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach.

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

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

In the younger days of the Republic there lived in the county of – two men, who were admitted on all hands to be the very best men In the county; which, in the Georgia vocabulary, means they could flog any other two men in the county.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

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.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

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

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.

There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there – the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.

Reading the dictionary helps me express myself better. I can spend hours flicking through a thesaurus, too. It’s not about expanding my vocabulary, it’s just that I have a very specific taste with words. I’ll sit and write lists of them to help me better describe my life.

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

A backup plan means somewhere in my head, I think I might fail and that word is not in my vocabulary. Plus I’m too talented to fail.

For me, a dancer is part of an artist’s entertainment – ‘backup dancer’ isn’t even in my vocabulary.

Reading helps you to be knowledgeable. It also improvises your vocabulary. It’s a very good habit, extremely essential.

Donald Trump was sharp; he was very perceptive. He was engaging. He had this expansive vocabulary, and he very seldom took breaks.

Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue – there’s this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.

A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it’s so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary.

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.

After 14 years of running DonorsChoose.org as someone who had never written a line of code, I did do a three-month night school course. After all these years, I could at least speak some of the same vocabulary and have a first-hand appreciation for what my colleagues on the engineering team are doing.

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.

The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity.

Failure isn’t an option. I’ve erased the word fear from my vocabulary and I think when you erase fear you can’t fail.

I’m a man of few words.” “If you read more, you might have a larger vocabulary.

When you are wanting to comfort someone in their grief take the words ‘at least’ out of your vocabulary. In saying them you minimise someone else’s pain…Don’t take someone else’s grief and try to put it in a box that YOU can manage. Learn to truly grieve with others for as long as it may take.

La meВ  decine a fait quelques petits progre’В  s dans ses connaissances depuis Molie’В  re, mais aucun dans son vocabulaire. Medicine has made a few, small advances in knowledge since Molie’ r e, but none in its vocabulary.

A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.

Genres give a vocabulary. They give a frame of reference for the audience to enter into a movie. Then, once they have their footing, that’s when you can start doing things that they don’t expect.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology’s virtues.

I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I’m a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

It’s important to read because it’s really good for your vocabulary. It’s really good for your imagination. I enjoy reading because I find it relaxing.

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.

Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness.

The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the “exalted” substances.

Rick Perry told reporters this week that he has a permit to carry a concealed handgun. He also has a concealed vocabulary, concealed knowledge of the issues, concealed tolerance.

Parents spend a lot of time talking over kids. My son went through a vocabulary burst as I was writing The Bear. I thought, What if I just stopped and listened?

We’re looking to help our guitar buddies do their thing while at the same time we try to create something we might enjoy listening to ourselves. If anything we are trying to develop a vocabulary so we can converse more fluidly.

Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.

The colors of ‘The Nutcracker’ ballet score have become a part of the vocabulary of film music. It’s where so much of the 19th-century romantic music that I call upon as a film composer is rooted.

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you’re going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.

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

My dad didn’t have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in ‘Harvest,’ I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

I have a small vocabulary, which I move around fast.

Dan Curry is the funniest guy in the world. I can sit in a room with him for hours, and he’s just cracking me up constantly. And Kitao is the next Terry Gilliam. A lot of comedy directors are just comedic writers, but they don’t have any sense of aesthetic or visual vocabulary.

When I was in the sixth grade my friend and I always won writing contests, and we read a lot of books. We were always the ones that read the most books in class. I thought about writing but visual arts weren’t part of my vocabulary.

The term ‘laity’ is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.

The word ‘retirement’ is not in my vocabulary right now.

Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense.

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

I work in a strange business, and ‘trust’ is a word that’s not even in the vocabulary.

True expression is hard when performing opera. The problem is that opera relies on the dramatic context of the piece. It can be interpreted and represented, but there are guidelines; there is a vocabulary within the pieces that you must know objectively and reflect.

A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind.

Retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren’t going to get rid of me that way.

I work in a strange business, and trust is a word that’s not even in the vocabulary.

One barrier… is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.

In the critic’s vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” — Essay: “Kafka and his Precursors

In my vocabulary there are two bad words: art and good taste.

Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of vocabulary are your brain’s limits, not the universe’s.

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It’s more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society.

People are complex. You can be smart and still look hot. You can be a punk rocker yet have a refined vocabulary. It’s all about this mashup that makes us who we are and I think that’s a beautiful thing.

I’ve grown, and my passion for music has grown. I’ve become more advanced and I’ve enhanced my vocabulary. All around artist development.

Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.

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.

A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.

Photographs don’t ‘reveal’ much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.

We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.

When I finally came to the United States, I was forced to get a job right away. I spoke no English – none. I started working as an aesthetician in this beautiful boutique salon in Beverly Hills. Being an aesthetician didn’t require an elaborate vocabulary in English. My first client was Cindy Crawford! I swear.

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

The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

A lot of people who make films in my generation have the vocabulary of all the films they’ve seen before.

The pseudoscience of astrology has no place in magick. Astrology has already died twice: once with the classical gods, and a second time after the Enlightenment. The complete failure of contemporary psychology to create anything other than a vocabulary of intellectual rubbish has encouraged astrology to resurface.

My Vocabularies vary, its so exclusionary You’ll find my baby pictures in modern dictionaries Next to mighty mercenaries, and visual visionaries

WHY is the most important word in an actor’s vocabulary.

I don’t know how else to tell the story except to utilise that vocabulary: the rain, the darkness, the mansions, the framing, etc, the lighting and that sort of thing.

‘Give up… it’s time to quit,’ I don’t think I’ve ever really accepted those kinds of words in my life or vocabulary.

I feel a vocabulary in my music that is coming from popular music. Popular music is like the mother of all languages.

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

We don’t have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer… But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

I feel that this is a vocabulary that I grew up with. This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it’s natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them and located them. That’s no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.

My emoji vocabulary is pretty limited to, like, the smiling poop and the rainbow and a unicorn or something.

Our emotions are ever-changing and infinitely varied, but the words with which we describe them are fixed and rigid. Our life is like quicksilver, our vocabulary like steel. Sometimes a consummate poet succeeds in rendering the quality of life in words. For the rest of us, this is not possible.

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn’t exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.

As slippery as smooth grapes, words exploding in the light like dormant seeds waiting in the vaults of vocabulary, alive again, and giving life: once again the heart distills them.

I cannot stand Hollywood child performances. It just reeks of artifice, and it’s weird that, for some reason, Hollywood feels they have to make their child characters smarter than adults, and suddenly kids have the vocabulary of a college grad.

In Greek mythology, the hero wants to be great, but the very concept does not exist in the Indian vocabulary. Yet it has become the global template. And it’s a template that won’t fit in India.

I think that it’s not a bad thing to not be too versed in the vocabulary of cinema, because you start to think that certain things are allowed and not allowed.

When you have no idea what to do or how to do it, you just need to see and absorb as much as you possibly can and just fill your vocabulary and your brain with as much as humanly possible.

Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.

Drawing is the simplest way of establishing a picture vocabulary because it is an instant, personal declaration of what is important and what is not.

We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda’s attacks on America launched the nation into three wars – against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.

Compromise is a word found only in the vocabulary of those who have no will to fight.

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’.

I have no fear, no fear at all. I wake up, and I have no fear. I go to bed without fear. Fear, fear, fear, fear. Yes, ‘fear’ is a word that is not in my vocabulary.

There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved

It’s very hard to get pretentious about beer. You can become knowledgeable and start to talk with a highfalutin’ vocabulary. But you can only go so far with beer, and I’ve always liked that.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

Your understanding of what you read and hear is, to a very large degree, determined by your vocabulary, so improve your vocabulary daily.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.

[The word class has] been excised from the acceptable political vocabulary, except in the limited usage of right-wingers when they accuse liberals of inciting ‘class warfare’ – a charge that means it’s okay for rich people to vote their economic interests but it’s not all right to encourage poor people to do so.

Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary, sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.

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.

Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

Many people are afraid to talk about race because it’s so emotionally loaded. We don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

When I draw it feels very natural – intuitive. I don’t think about it, I just do it. My visual vocabulary is self-selecting and second nature to me. Writing is harder for me. It’s something I struggle with. Drawing always comes first.

Please, don’t torture me with cliches. If you’re going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.

I’m Howard Stern with a vocabulary. I’m the man he wishes he could be.

As you can appreciate over my lifetime I’ve developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box.

The larger your audience, the smaller your vocabulary and range of referents – the fewer your means of expression. You can’t rely on the luxury of intimacy.

I panicked when my son, Jett, stopped eating baby food. He’s only two, but his food vocabulary is fantastic. He likes my baked tilapia and string beans with chopped garlic. But he really likes pizza. Sometimes every inanimate object to him is pizza.

I ain’t no author, man . . . my writing skills are not of “New York Times” best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain’t. My vocabulary ain’t.

Fear is not a part of my vocabulary, actually, and I think that it’s really made me a much smarter, braver for sure, person.

How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can’t describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. … Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

Growing up with a dad who was a classic-rock guy, I felt out of place with what was happening in pop culture. The Beatles, Zeppelin, T. Rex – that, for me, was the music that could never leave our vocabulary.

It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.

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.

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.

Parents spend a lot of time talking over kids. My son went through a vocabulary burst as I was writing ‘The Bear.’ I thought, ‘What if I just stopped and listened?’

One of the reasons I like immersing myself in different texts, putting myself in the company of other writers, is that they do change your vocabulary. They change what you write about or they change the length of lines.

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.

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

I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself… That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.

I will say that is a quality I love about great directors, which is the ability to give you one word that can inspire you. I appreciate a director with a very good vocabulary. There are so many directors that I have worked with that can give you one word.

First, we have to find a common vocabulary for energy security. This notion has a radically different meaning for different people. For Americans it is a geopolitical question. For the Europeans right now it is very much focused on the dependence on imported natural gas.

I pretend to be calm, it’s not a word in my vocabulary.

One superlatively important effect of wide reading is the enlargement of vocabulary which always accompanies it.

I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I’ll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts.

What is comfortable fashion? To be comfortable, that can’t be in the vocabulary of fashion. If you want to be comfortable, stay home in your pajamas.

Most of us don’t think about miracles that we could possibly do. We don’t have a vocabulary of how God works with the specific things that He does, and we don’t know how to align ourselves with what He is doing so that we can be His vehicle on the earth to deliver a miracle.

Boxers don’t tend to come from Cambridge or Oxford. Sometimes the things we say don’t come out well. We are not known for our vocabulary.

Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me.

What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.

If you want something badly enough, make an attempt. If you want to paint, get a brush and do it. If you want to sing, sing. A lot of people get scared. They’re afraid to fail. Take that word out of your vocabulary. You don’t “fail.” You’ve “tried your best.”

I need to eliminate ‘like’ from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, ‘That’s seriously like… ‘ I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.

I’m learning all the right vocabulary words – ‘You’re right, I’m wrong.’

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

Words have power. Use the language of leadership versus the vocabulary of a victim.

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF … No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.

I came from a broken home and have been so concerned about my own family that divorce has not even been in my vocabulary. It’s against everything I ever believed in.

Being a mother gives you an incredible feeling of empowerment, you think if I can go through such pain and that level of sleep and still operate and not be grumpy you can do anything. It can be quite scary, you can’t function your brain, forget your vocabulary.

Your whole vocabulary’s played out, admit it.
Still wack if it came out my mouth and I spit it.

The purpose of all of this is not to walk around with new vocabulary words, but to cause you to speculate on the marvel of your own being.

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.

‘Stay’ is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.

With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

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.

Style is a continuum. Style never changes. It’s a straight line. It’s a refinement of the same vocabulary. Style takes you from day to evening, season to season.

Now if you think about the 20th century and the idea of visual vocabulary the album occupies a really important space in the cultural landscape and, above all.

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

Banish the words ‘I can’t’ from your vocabulary. Remember: If ‘can’t’ equals ‘won’t’, ‘can’ equals ‘will.’

For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.

The words “I Can’t” should be permanently stricken from your vocabulary, especially the vocabulary of your thoughts. You must see yourself always growing and improving.

Every company has its own texture, vocabulary, and singular place in dance history, and I have always wanted to share my perspective of these world renowned institutions.

Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands – running, fitness, training, motorsports – is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business – handbags, ready-to-wear – is all about the product.

I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools.

While you’re testing out armatures of puppets, you’re also trying to find the proper visual vocabulary for the character and to come up with a guidebook of sorts for how a character will move and act.

There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male… The other voice, the one I had from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.

I want our students to be so accustomed to children of other cultures that the words ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ won’t be in their vocabulary. They won’t need them – they’ll live it.

Subconsciously you just pick up things into your sort of musical vocabulary and use them.

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It’s a 12-bar form that’s played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that’s been used by rock n’ roll. It’s related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

I’ve always been very wordy; I’ve got a great vocabulary.

Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.

Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren’t up to the job.

I am a bit of a dynamic personality and have the ability to use my vocabulary in some creative ways.

One of the frustrations about the modern world is that we don’t even have a good vocabulary to describe our state. The word sentiment sounds mushy. […] Sentiment is not mushy.

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children. Children still haven’t closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth

Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary.

My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.

We use the vocabulary of light to describe a spiritual experience.

I wish I had paid more attention in my psych class in college. I would’ve had a broader vocabulary to draw from.

Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one’s vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.

They’re just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.

There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts…it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.