Quotes about alphabet

A collection of quotes on the topic of alphabet, letter, use, word.

Quotes about alphabet

Louis Tomlinson photo

“One time, Niall sat on the floor for hours trying to find a way of putting his M&M's in alphabetical order.”

Louis Tomlinson (1991) English pop singer

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5834782.Louis_Tomlinson

Ludwig Van Beethoven photo

“I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer

"A meeting of minds", The Guardian, 18 November 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/nov/18/classicalmusicandopera.thomasstearnseliot
Attributed

Tennessee Williams photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Mark Twain photo

“For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Actual source: A letter to The Economist (16 January 1971), written by one M.J. Shields (or M.J. Yilz, by the end of the letter). The letter is quoted in full in one of Willard Espy's Words at Play books. This was a modified version of a piece "Meihem in ce Klasrum", published in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j31/satires.php
Misattributed

Mark Twain photo

“Some German words are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:

Freundschaftsbezeigungen.
Dilletantenaufdringlichkeiten.
Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.
These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper any time and see them marching majestically across the page,—and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. "Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection. When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors, and thus increase the variety of my stock. Here are some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:

Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.
Alterthumswissenschaften.
Kinderbewahrungsanstalten.
Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen.
Wiederherstellungsbestrebungen.
Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.
Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape,—but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help; but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere,—so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed.”

A Tramp Abroad (1880)

Mark Twain photo
Neil Gaiman photo
Isaac Bashevis Singer photo
Aryabhata photo

“His work, called Aryabhatiya, is composed of three parts, in only the first of which use is made of a special notation of numbers. It is an alphabetical system in which the twenty-five consonants represent 1-25, respectively; other letters stand for 30, 40, …., 100 etc. The other mathematical parts of Aryabhatiya consists of rules without examples. Another alphabetic system prevailed in Southern India, the numbers 1-19 being designated by consonants, etc.”

Aryabhata (476–550) Indian mathematician-astronomer

Florian Cajori in: A History of Mathematical Notations http://books.google.co.in/books?id=_byqAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT961&dq=Notations&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Wz65U5WYDIKulAW1qIGYDA&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Notation&f=false, Courier Dover Publications, 26 September 2013, p. 47.

George Carlin photo
Anne Fadiman photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Dr. Seuss photo
Steven Wright photo
Derek Landy photo

“You said I was your number-one pick."
"And you are. In our hearts. Alphabetically, though, Dusk comes before you.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: The Maleficent Seven: From the World of Skulduggery Pleasant

Haruki Murakami photo
Sarah Vowell photo
Nat Turner photo
Colm Tóibín photo

“I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, that reminds me daily of my failure.”

Colm Tóibín (1955) Irish novelist and writer

World of Colm Tóibín, writer http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9108553/World-of-Colm-Toibin-writer.html, The Daily Telegraph (27 February 2012)

Peter Greenaway photo
Fran Lebowitz photo

“You silly old fool, you don't even know the alphabet of your own silly old business.”

William Henry Maule (1788–1858) British politician

Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 86. The quotation has been attributed to many others, such as Lord Chief Justice Campbell, Lord Chesterfield, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Pembroke, Lord Westbury, and to an anonymous judge, and said to have been spoken in court to Garter King at Arms, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, or some other high-ranking herald, who had confused a "bend" with a "bar" or had demanded fees to which he was not entitled. George Bernard Shaw quotes it in Pygmalion (1912) in the form, "The silly people dont [sic] know their own silly business."

Maule cannot be the original source of the quotation, as it is quoted nearly twenty years before his birth in Charles Jenner's The Placid Man: Or, The Memoirs of Sir Charles Beville (1770): "Sir Harry Clayton ... was perhaps far better qualified to have written a Peerage of England than Garter King at Arms, or Rouge Dragon, or any of those parti-coloured officers of the court of honor, who, as a great man complained on a late solemnity, are but too often so silly as not to know their own silly business." "Old Lord Pembroke" (Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke) is said by Horace Walpole (in a letter of May 28, 1774 to the Rev. William Cole) to have directed the quip, "Thou silly fellow! Thou dost not know thy own silly business," at John Anstis, Garter King at Arms (though in his 1833 edition of Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, George Agar-Ellis, 1st Baron Dover, attributes the saying to Lord Chesterfield in a footnote, in the form "You foolish man, you do not understand your own foolish business"). Edmund Burke also quotes it ("'Silly man, that dost not know thy own silly trade!' was once well said: but the trade here is not silly.") in a "Speech in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Esq." on May 7, 1789 (when Maule was just over a year old). Chesterfield or Pembroke fit best in point of time.
Attributed

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 66

Shreya Ghoshal photo
Kurt Schwitters photo
Donald E. Westlake photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 61

John Wallis photo
Michel De Montaigne photo

“Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet— the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Jane Roberts photo
Marc Chagall photo

“In exasperation, I furiously attacked the floors and walls of the Moscow Theater. My mural paintings sight there, in obscurity. Have you seen them? Rant and rave, my contemporaries! In one way or another, my first theatrical alphabet gave you a belly-ache. Not modest? I'll leave that to my grandmother: it bores me. Despise me, if you like.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

ca. 1921
Quote from 'Chagall in the Yiddish Theater', Avram Kampf, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 94
1920's

Clarence Darrow photo
Ellsworth Kelly photo

“This book [full of linoleum prints] will be an alphabet of pictorial elements without text, which shall aim at establishing a larger scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, and a new spirit of art accompanying architecture.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

In the introduction, (written in 1951) of his not published book: "Line Form and Color"; as quoted in "Ellsworth Kelly, a Retrospective", ed. Diane Waldman, Guggenheim museum, New York 1997, p. 22
1950 - 1968

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 21

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to “the Africa within.””

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 51

Carlo Rovelli photo
Harold Innis photo
John Gray photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 23

Prince photo

“I'm going down 2 Alphabet Street
I'm gonna crown the first girl that I meet
I'm gonna talk so sexy
She'll want me from my head 2 my feet.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Alphabet St.
Song lyrics, Lovesexy (1988)

Erik Naggum photo
James Stephens photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Forgotten Home http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21398/Forgotten_Home
From the poems written in English

Scott Lynch photo
Tony Buzan photo
Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
Eddie Izzard photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Frances Wright photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 70

Amit Chaudhuri photo

“Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles') in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today (2012)

Nancy Peters photo

“The tempest unleashes an alphabet
letters fall through the apertures of crazy angles
to spell out the future
uprooting the course of invention
and enslaving the masters”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

It's In the Wind (1977) "Ceremonies In A Polar Garden"
1970s

Vannevar Bush photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 81

“A scholar like myself who is not a Sinologist and yet ventures the proposition that Chinese languages should be rewritten in the Greek alphabet (or "Romanized", to use the current term) is treading on uncharted territory (for him) and does so at his peril.”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp005_chinese_greek.html

Marshall McLuhan photo

“Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 17

Giorgio de Chirico photo

“The structure of cities, the architecture of houses, squares, gardens, public walks, gateways, railway stations, etc – all these provide us with the basic principles of a great Metaphysical aesthetic... We, who live under the sign of the Metaphysical alphabet, we know the joy and sorrows to be found in a gateway, a street corner, a room, on the surface of a table, between the sides of a box…”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 233
De Chirico's statement on Metaphysical aesthetic in painting motifs like houses, architecture, railway stations
1908 - 1920, On Mystery and Creation, Paris 1913

Edwin Abbott Abbott photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 15

Sam Kinison photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 74

Aron Ra photo

“The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of language. For example, there are several languages based on the Roman alphabet of only 26 letters. Yet by arranging these in different orders, we’ve added several hundred thousand words to English since the 5th century, and many of them were completely new. The principle is the same in genetics. There are millions of named and classified species of life, all of them based on a variable arrangement of only four chemical components. For another example, we know that Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all evolved from Latin, a vernacular which is now extinct. Each of these newer tongues emerged via a slow accumulation of their own unique slang lingo –thus diverging into new dialects, and eventually distinct forms of gibberish such that the new Romans could no longer communicate with either Parisians or Spaniards. Similarly, if we took an original Latin speaking population and divided them sequestered in complete isolation over several centuries, they might still be able to understand each other, or their jargon may have become unintelligible to foreigners. But they won’t start speaking Italian or Romanian because identical vocabularies aren’t going to occur twice.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
David Crystal photo
Robert South photo

“Of covetousness, we may truly say that it makes' both the Alpha and Omega in the devil's alphabet, and that it is the first vice in corrupt nature which moves, and the last which dies.”

Robert South (1634–1716) English theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 167.

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 56

Angelique Rockas photo
Amir Taheri photo
Herman Melville photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Hermann Ebbinghaus photo

“I went to a record store, they said they specialized in hard-to-find records. Nothing was alphabetized.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Do You Believe in Gosh?

Michel Seuphor photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,'yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam [Rig-Veda, 1.24.7]. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing…. Wanton waste, careless spoiling of physical things in an incredibly short time, loose disorder, misuse of service and materials due either to vital grasping or to tamasic inertia are baneful to prosperity and tend to drive away or discourage the Wealth-Power. These things have long been rampant in the society and, if that continues, an increase in our means might well mean a proportionate increase in the wastage and disorder and neutralise the material advantage. This must be remedied if there is to be any sound progress…. Asceticism for its own sake is not the ideal of this yoga, but self-control in the vital and right order in the material are a very important part of it… and even an ascetic discipline is better for our purpose than a loose absence of true control. Mastery of the material does not mean having plenty and profusely throwing it out or spoiling it as fast as it comes or faster. Mastery implies in it the right and careful utilisation of things and also a self-control in their use…. There is a consciousness in [things], a life which is not the life and consciousness of man and animal which we know, but still secret and real. That is why we must have a respect for physical things and use them rightly, not misuse and waste, ill-treat or handle with a careless roughness. This feeling of all being consciousness or alive comes when our own physical consciousness'and not the mind only'awakes out of its obscurity and becomes aware of the One in all things, the Divine everywhere.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Undated
India's Rebirth

Will Cuppy photo

“[Footnote] The Phoenicians employed an alphabet of twenty-one consonants. They left no literature. You can't be literary without a few vowels.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Hannibal

Marcel Duchamp photo
Edgard Varèse photo

“Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor.”

Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) French composer

Edgard Varèse lecture, edited by Chou Wen-Chung, published in: 391, Nr. 5. June 17, 1917. Translated by Louise Varèse; Quoted in: Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music: A Continuing Symposium (1996), .
Context: Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor.
Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives.
I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

Dr. Seuss photo

“I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!”

On Beyond Zebra! (1955)
Context: In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!

Joaquin Miller photo

“Man's books are but man's alphabet,
Beyond and on his lessons lie — The lessons of the violet,
The large gold letters of the sky”

Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge

"The Larger College".
In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890)
Context: p>Man's books are but man's alphabet,
Beyond and on his lessons lie — The lessons of the violet,
The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil:The toil that nature ever taught,
The patient toil, the constant stir,
The toil of seas where shores are wrought,
The toil of Christ, the carpenter;
The toil of God incessantly
By palm-set land or frozen sea.</p

Dr. Seuss photo
Johann Kaspar Lavater photo

“Actions, looks, words, steps, form the alphabet by which you may spell characters.”

Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) Swiss poet

No. 637
Aphorisms on Man (1788)

Edward Said photo