Quotes about wording (9378 quotes, page 39)

“If you ask most teachers of science what their main goal is, they will probably say: for my students to understand the basic concepts of physics, chemistry, biology, or whatever other field is being studied. The critical words here are ‘understand’ and ‘concept’, and both of these terms assume a fundamentally psychological approach to learning… If we see the goals of science education in terms of what students will be able to do, and how they will be able to make sense of the world, rather than in terms of our speculations about what may be going on in their brains, then we need to see scientific learning as the acquisition of cultural tools and practices, as learning to participate in very specific and often specialized forms of human activity”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Jay L. Lemke, " Teaching all the languages of science: Words, symbols, images, and actions http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/papers/barcelon.htm." Conference on Science Education in Barcelona. 1998.

World , Education , Understanding , Sense

“Necessity, now there's a word to feed every outrage on decency.”

Steven Erikson book Toll the Hounds

Toll the Hounds (2008)

“Ere now a simple tiller of the soil
Hath spoken words of wisdom to mankind;
A cloak all tattered and besmirched with toil
Hath ofttimes clothed a man of prudent mind.”

Francesco Berni (1497–1535) Italian poet

Ha qualche volta un ortolan parlato
Cose molte a proposito a la gente;
E da un mantel rotto e sporco e stato
Molte volte coperto un uom prudente.
LVIII, 1
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato

Wisdom , Clothes

“The word “loser” is spoken with such contempt these days, a man might like to forget the losses in his own life that taught him something about good judgment. The money he invested in that casino in Atlantic City that went bust, the university course he enrolled in that promised to teach him the secrets of success but instead he wound up unemployed and 40 grand in debt, the candidate whose hat he wore who turned out to be tone-deaf and deluded — dumb, dumb, dumb, and yet his loved ones did not chortle and point and do the nyaa-nyaa. They put an arm around him and said, “This is how we learn.””

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

And it is.
"Garrison Keillor: God help us. We’re in trouble down here." in The Washington Post (26 July 2016) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/god-help-us-were-in-trouble-down-here/2016/07/26/989cde08-535d-11e6-b7de-dfe509430c39_story.html

Love , Life , Money , Secret

“Some of God's children, the "holy people", the writer among the number, though not associated with the "Miller movement", nor with the denomination subsequently organized, which calls itself the "Second Advent Church," have been looking at and "earnestly waiting" for Michael's Kingdom; and gladly we bear testimony to the "blessedness" of the wonderfully clear unfoldings of our Father's plan, at and since the fall of 1874 - the end of the 1335 days.
Words fail us to express this blessedness! Only those who have been refreshed in spirit with this new wine of the Kingdom could appreciate it, if we could describe it. It is therefore something to be felt, rather than told. It was at and since the ending of those 1335 prophetic, symbolic days that the previous views of the Lord's presence, and the fact that we are even now living in the time of the "harvest" of this Gospel age, and in the time of the setting up of our Michael's (Christ's) Kingdom, came to be known.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 88.

God , Children , People , Age

“Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ’s word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Two Ethical-Religious Minor Essays (1849), P. 103

Life , Search , Christ

“The DARPA model has three elements:
Ambitious goals. The agency’s projects are designed to harness science and engineering advances to solve real-world problems or create new opportunities. At Defense, GPS was an example of the former and stealth technology of the latter. The problems must be sufficiently challenging that they cannot be solved without pushing or catalyzing the science. The presence of an urgent need for an application creates focus and inspires greater genius.
Temporary project teams. DARPA brings together world-class experts from industry and academia to work on projects of relatively short duration. Team members are organized and led by fixed-term technical managers, who themselves are accomplished in their fields and possess exceptional leadership skills. These projects are not open-ended research programs. Their intensity, sharp focus, and finite time frame make them attractive to the highest-caliber talent, and the nature of the challenge inspires unusual levels of collaboration. In other words, the projects get great people to tackle great problems with other great people.
Independence. By charter, DARPA has autonomy in selecting and running projects. Such independence allows the organization to move fast and take bold risks and helps it persuade the best and brightest to join.”

Regina E. Dugan (1963) American businesswoman, inventor, and technology developer

“Special Forces” Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems (2013)

People , World , Nature , Problem

“All three elements of storytelling carry one vital philosophy– to offer universal insight, and many instances, hope and therapy to those who absolutely need it. To illuminate a combined and universal purpose, whether it be through the written word, the spoken word, or both elements incorporated into another element of truth. All exist to tell a story to the world.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On being a writer, actress, and producer http://reelladies.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/reel-lady-masiela-lusha/

Truth , World , Hope , Universe

“You talk for talking’s sake,' she hissed. I asked if that was bad. 'I mean it,' the girl replied. 'You talk for talking’s sake.' I had heard her the first time and had understood the words but not the contempt with which they were charged. 'Would you be equally annoyed,' I asked, 'if I danced for dancing’s sake? […] I should have said, 'Would you hate me if I lived for living’s sake?' This would have been the total question — the one to which a full reply could have saved the world.”

Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) writer, Actor

How to Have a Life-Style

Hate , World , Girl , Question

“Whole poems are made out of many single poems we call words... I am trying to recover a part of the poet's work which has been lost. Our first poets were the namers, not the rhymers.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

undated quote about his own poetry; in ' Objects Are What We Aren't' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/26/objects-are-what-we-arent/, by Andy Battaglia; The Parish Review, February 26, 2015

Parting

“You could try and read my lyrics off of this paper before I lay them. But, you won't take the sting out of these words before I say them.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Not Afraid"
2010s, Recovery (2010)

Reading

“The question was what's happening to the individual in America? Is the individual going the way of the environment, being destroyed? In other words, were we becoming the creatures of the machine?
That was the way people thought in the '60s. Now maybe that's passé today but that's the kind of thing people thought about. Are we turning into machines? They wanted to rebel against that.
Their rebellion cannot be called a success by any means, far from it. Those of us who tried are very grateful that we tried to the degree we did. Anybody who achieved any success against the machine feels good about it.”

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

The Greening of America turns 40 (2010)

People , Way , Feeling , Question

“I speak of my own feelings—I can judge
Of others but by outward show, and that
Is falser than the actor's studied part.
We dress our words and looks in borrow'd robes:
The mind is as the face—for who goes forth
In public walks without a veil at least?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

A History of the Lyre
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Feeling , Study , Parting

“History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Epilogue II, ch. 1 http://www.classicreader.com/book/92/354/
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

Life , History , Appearance

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Life , God , People , Truth

“The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play
And in one word, just nothing.”

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

Attributed

World

“An honest man's word is as good as his bond.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book IV, Ch. 34.

“I could throw 56-pound words clear across the Grand Canyon. As a matter of course, I went into politics.”

Henry Fountain Ashurst (1874–1962) United States Senator from Arizona

"The Silver-Tongued Sunbeam" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,896290-1,00.html. Time (June 8, 1962)

“All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.”

Richard Powers (1957) novelist

Galatea 2.2

“Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.”

Alastair Reynolds (1966) British novelist and astronomer

The Great Wall of Mars (p. 37)
Short fiction, Galactic North (2006)

“155. Good words are worth much, and cost little.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“Made still a blund'ring kind of melody;
Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in.
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad.”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. II, line 413.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Sense , Madness

“I would also ask you to fulfil in an abundant measure your obligation for the revival of the glory of Hindu culture and civilisation, not from a narrow or bigoted point of view but for strengthening the very root of nationalism in this country. In this great land of ours where twenty-eight crores of Hindus live, the word Hindu sometimes stinks in the nostrils of many a son of India.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Benaras Hindu University Convocation on 1st December 1940.

Country

“But the words of lovers are a language apart; their melody is a fairy song departing with the one haunted hour; to repeat it is to make it commonplace—cold, yet we can all remember it.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Lovers

“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 8
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“The party first makes a correct return to the best of his ability but is considered to be a simpleton and fool. His word or explanations are not accepted or are looked upon with suspicion by the Assessing Authority, who may be his inferior perhaps in status. Arbitrary and unwarranted deductions are made and the poor party is unfairly over-assessed without hope of getting any proper relief. If he appeals the Superior Officer supports his subordinate and it may take years, expense and the ruling of a High Court to see that Justice is done. So what can be the result in such a case? At the next encounter you may be sure the party will be ready to match his skill against his instigator and to throw as many red herrings as he can on the trail. It will now require all the subtlety, knowledge and acumen of the authorities to arrive at the proper conclusion, and failure is generally the result. Lakhs of rupees of Income Tax dues remain outstanding and years of litigation follow and eventually the Tax is time-barred and non recoverable.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Income Tax

Justice , Hope , Fools , Failure

“Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Boulter's Monument. (Supposed to have been inserted by Dr. Johnson, 1745.)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Men , God , Daughters

“Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Ideas and Opinions (1954), pp. 25–26
1950s

Communication

“The word 'policy' generally refers to the principles that govern action directed towards given ends. Any study of policy therefore should concern itself with three things — what we want (the ends), how we get it (the means), and who are 'we,' that is, what is the nature of the organization or group concerned. Science is concerned with means rather than with ends. The study of "what we want" (objectives) extends beyond the boundaries of the social sciences into the field of ethics. It is not the business of the social sciences to evaluate the ultimate ends of human activity. The social sciences, therefore, cannot give a final answer to the question whether any given policy is right. The social scientist can study what people say they want, what they think they want and may even infer from their behaviour what they really want, but it is not the business of science to say whether people want right things.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, Principles of economic policy, 1958, p. 1-2

People , Question , Business , Nature

“The words we use are the most clumsy symbols for meanings, and to suppose that such words as "war," "glory," "justice," "liberty,” “home," mean the same in two languages, is an error.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Give Me Liberty (1936)

War , Justice , Error , Home

“Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

The Heretic (1968)

God

“Giving people a voice on the one hand, and keeping the community and people safe on the other hand. Our bias tends to be to want to give people a voice and let people express a wide range of opinions. I don’t think that’s a liberal or conservative thing; those are the words in the U. S.”

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

In an interview with Kara Swisher as quoted in Zuckerberg: The Recode interview https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher (July 18, 2018), Recode.

People , Communication , Thinking

“Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"The Essential Ellison", interview by Ishmael Reed in Y'Bird 1, no. 1 (1978): 130-59.

“Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command
Some peaceful province in acrostic land.
There thou mayst wings display and altars raise,
And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Source: Mac Flecknoe (1682), l. 205–208.

Peace , Way

“Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression. … by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking. … There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

English Prose Style (1928)
Literary Quotes

Thinking , Time

“ […] we can strip off all grammatical clues to sentence structure, all affixes and prepositions, and yet still achieve communication. Thus restricted to nouns, simple "stories" can be told in word chains: Woman, street, crowd, traffic, noise, haste, thief, bag, loss, scream, police…. Again, the reader's past experience of his language is sufficient to restore the missing elements, sufficiently accurately for the purpose. But of course, not only does the reader have experience of sentence structure, enabling him to supply the missing syntactical elements, but also he has experience of typical contexts in which the various words are used; many words bear an aura about with them. It might be more difficult to tell a tale about a policeman who robbed a woman, for instance, with so little redundancy! ”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Words and Meaning: Semantics, p.122

Communication , Loss , Past

“If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.”

Kingsley Amis book Jake's Thing

pg. 140
Jake's Thing (1978)

War , Youth

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date. Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals… very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity. By "codifying ignorance" I refer in part to the fact that they miss four of the five kingdoms of life… bacteria, protoctista, fungi, and plants.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

"Gaia is a Tough Bitch," The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution ed., John Brockman (1995).

Life , Animals , Parting

“Living and dead matter were so obviously at variance here, and the living matter so obviously triumphant in its adaptability over the dead elements and their rigid laws that the barren wilderness seemed to us more essentially alive than green trees rustling in the wind. How was it possible that for over a century scientists should have regarded nature as a harmonious whole, in itself so divinely complete that it needed no god? As long as the word nature conjured up the green woods and the flower-strewn meadows of our childhood that was understandable and in line with our own feelings. And even long scientific expeditions into the desert had done very little to correct this impression. It was only now, when the desert had become our home, that the old impression slowly began to fade.”

Henno Martin (1910–1998) German geologist

Source: Sheltering Desert; Union Deutsche Verlangsgesellschaft Ulm (1958), p. 87

God , Law , Feeling , Home

“And in this dying was brought to my mind the words of Christ: I thirst.
For I saw in Christ a double thirst: one bodily; another spiritual…”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Eighth Revelation, Chapter 17

Christ

“But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Abracadabra, p. 186
Waiting For The Barbarians (1997)

Faith

“The 'physical' does not mean any particular kind of reality, but a particular kind of denoting reality, namely a system of concepts in the natural sciences which is necessary for the cognition of reality. 'The physical' should not be interpreted wrongly as an attribute of one part of reality, but not of the other; it is rather a word denoting a kind of conceptual construction, as, e. g., the markers 'geographical' or 'mathematical', which denote not any distinct properties of real things, but always merely a manner of presenting them by means of ideas.”

Moritz Schlick book Théorie générale de la connaissance

Source: Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, 1925, p. 27 i. ; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 83

Mathematics , Idea , Nature , Reality

“Here's a thought for every man who's tried to understand what's in his hands
Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say / Chained to all the places that he never wished to stay / As he faced the sun, he cast no shadow.
As they took his soul they stole his pride”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Cast No Shadow
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)

Soul , Understanding , Sun

“I don't care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Affurisms. From Josh Billings: His Sayings (1865)

“See! he sinks
Without a word; and his ensanguined bier
Is vacant in the west, while far and near
Behold! each coward shadow eastward shrinks,
Thou dost not strive, O sun, nor dost thou cry
Amid thy cloud-built streets.”

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian

The Rosary and Other Poems, On the Ramparts at Angoulême; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 769-70.

Sun , Cry

“Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!”

Sinclair Lewis book It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

Strong , Country

“I go on Good Morning America yesterday and say that I'm personally sorry my analysis on WMDs before the war was wrong and I'm angry about the CIA mistake. I mean, any honest commentator would say that, but the left-wing press sees my admission as some kind of liberal policy vindication and is using my words to hammer the president. Well, that's dishonest. I still believe removing Saddam was the right thing to do and that history will prove it. And there's also the possibility that WMDs will be found, so I might have to apologize for my apology. I don't mind. I still hope they find WMDs.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2004-02-12
The WMD Controversy Heats Up
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News
Television
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,111229,00.html

War , Hope , History , Personality

“He was pretty. His eyes were kind and young. One had to wonder whether he was fourteen years old, or a thousand, being so smooth and untouched. A little boy peered out of the man's face. He was funny… I was bewildered… a man, responsible for the life and death of thousands, and yet there was no trace on him? One could be frightened of less, and yet so harmlessly innocent? Yes, innocent was the word… I knew I would remember this meeting the rest of my life, because I had never before met an emptyness like this.”

Ingeborg Refling Hagen (1895–1989) Norwegian writer

On Dwight Eisenhower, volume III
Memoirs

Life , Death , Boy

“I don’t think that a statement like this, issued saying that his ‘choice of words was not the best,’ changes anything.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

The View interview with Sandra Fluke. ABC. March 5, 2012. — cited in The Washington Post, Lisa, de Moraes, Sandra Fluke sits down with the ladies of ‘The View’, The Washington Post Company, March 8, 2012, March 5, 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/sandra-fluke-sits-down-for-first-tv-interview-on-the-view/2012/03/05/gIQAdPJUtR_blog.html,
Media interviews

Thinking , Change

“As we came away we ran into Lloyd George. Turning to me he said: "What are you going to do, my boy, when you grow up?" "I'm going into the Navy, sir," I replied. He frowned. "There are many greater storms in politics. If it's piracy you want, with broadsides, boarding parties, walking the plank and blood on the deck, this is the place." His words had gone home. That evening I confided to my father that what Lloyd George had said had decided my life. It would be politics for me.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Recounted by Julian Amery, Approach March: A Venture in Autobiography (1973)
Undated

Life , Home , Confidence , Boy

“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Salon interview (2000)

People , Books , Feeling , Boy

“There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.”

Rex Stout (1886–1975) American writer

Rex Stout, on why he turned from writing serious fiction to detective stories
The New York Times, "An Interview with Mister Rex Stout"

Money

“We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. "If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process," Stanley Cavell has remarked, "that may be because speaking to someone does not seem mysterious enough." Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of humman discourse."”

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) American anthropologist

Clifford Geertz. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Culture. (1973) pp. 3-4.

Way , Sense , Universe

“Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 10

Men , Way , Error , Reading

“The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly!"”

Konrad Lorenz book On Aggression

Source: On Aggression (1963), Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility

Youth , Understanding , Science , Joy

“[A]nybody who has served in combat in any way understands that words are weapons. And I'm in a war. The war hasn't stopped. I've always used the books as a blunt instrument.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Dan Webster interview, originally published June 19, 2005, by the Spokesman Review,

War , Books , Way , Understanding

“Being Gentlemen and very far from the litigious humour of loving to wrangle about words or terms or notions as empty; they had before his coming in, readily agreed promiscuously to use when they pleased Elements and Principles as terms equivalent: and to understand both by the one and the other, those primitive and simple bodies of which the mixt ones are said to be composed, and into which they are ultimately resolved.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Physiological Considerations Part of the First Dialogue (16)
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

Love , Understanding

““The practice of employing images as ornaments and memorials to decorate the temple of the Lord is in a most especial manner approved by the Word of God himself. Moses was commanded to place two cherubim upon the ark, and to set up a brazen figure of the fiery serpent, that those of the murmuring Israelites who had been bitten might recover from the poison of their wounds by looking on the image. In the description of Solomon's temple, we read of that prince, not only that he made in the oracle two cherubim of olive tree, of ten 83 Vide supra, p. 17. 101 cubits in height, but that ‘all the walls of the temple round about he carved with divers figures and carvings.’ “In the first book of Paralipomenon (Chronicles) we observe that when David imposed his injunction upon Solomon to realise his intention of building a house to the Lord, he delivered to him a description of the porch and temple, and concluded by thus assuring him: ‘All these things came to me written by the hand of the Lord, that I may understand the works of the pattern.’ “The isolated fact that images were not only directed by the Almighty God to be placed in the Mosaic tabernacle, and in the more sumptuous temple of Jerusalem, but that [132] he himself exhibited the pattern of them, will be alone sufficient to authorise the practice of the Catholic Church in regard to a similar observance.”—(Hierurgia, p. 371.) All this may be briefly answered. There was no representation of the Jewish patriarchs or saints either in the tabernacle or in the temple of Solomon, as is the case with the Christian saints in the Roman Catholic and Græco-Russian Churches; and the brazen serpent, to which the author alludes, was broken into pieces by order of King Hezekiah as soon as the Israelites began to worship it.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Source: A Treatise of Relics (1543), pp. 100-101

God , Books , Understanding , Tree

“[The Constructive idea.. ] has revealed a universal law that the elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world; that their life and action are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature; that those elements are not chosen by convention by any utilitarian or other reason as words and figures are, they are not merely abstract signs, but they are immediately and organically bound up with human emotions. The revelation of this fundamental law has opened up a vast field in art giving the possibility of expression to those human impulses and emotions which have been neglected.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Naum Gabo (1937) 'Editorial', p. 7 as cited in: W. Rotzler (1989) Constructive Concepts - A History of Constructive Art from Cubism to the Present, Rizzoli.
1936 - 1977, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, 1937

Life , World , Law , Art

“It has been a general rule for drawing deeds and other legal documents from the earliest times, which one is taught when one first becomes a pupil to a conveyancer, never to change the form of words unless you are going to change the meaning, and it would be as well if those who are engaged in the preparation of Acts of Parliament would bear in mind that that is the real principle of construction.”

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn (1813–1896) British judge

Hadley v. Perks (1866), L. R. 1Q. B. 457.

Change , Time , Drawing

“While in England, I came across Sunday school material produced by a major Christian organization. Many conservative evangelical churches use it. One series of lessons covered the topic of origins. I was dismayed when the text declared that people need to believe in billions of years and evolution. But I was even more shocked when I read that the apostle Paul didn't understand science back in his time as we understand it today. Therefore, they concluded, what Paul wrote was not meant to answer questions about man's origins for today's world! What a low view of Scripture! They're looking on Paul's writings as the writings of a fallible human. But every word in the Bible was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit - it's the Word of God who knows everything!”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Did Eve really have an Extra Rib?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2002)

God , People , World , School

“Let's face it; regular monthly superhero comic books have taken on the look and smell of old men's pants. It's hardly a surprise comics lost the teenage audience or that the adult audience is now bored and irritated by the endless recycling of images they've already seen and words they've already read.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2003
http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597
On comics

Men , Books , Reading

“When I said, "I feel like everything I tried to do is there", it is less because of what I did than it is a case of Michael keeping his word. Sometimes he'd launch into a discourse, a convoluted discourse about something or other, and I had no idea what he was saying. I'd tease him about it, "What on earth are you talking about?"”

Madeleine Stowe (1958) American actress

Mohican Press interview (2005)

Feeling , Idea

“The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) Swiss author

Pt. 4, ch. 10
De l’Allemagne [Germany] (1813)

God , Sense

“The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the Arabic words, which correspond to the English, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in a good sense; and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.”

David Hume book Of the Standard of Taste

David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, 1760
Variant: The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the Arabic words, which correspond to the English, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in a good sense; and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

Justice , Revenge , Sense , Hurt

“What deserves to be called mysticism—not in the vague sense of the history and philosophy of religion, but rather in the Catholic-ecclesial sense—occurs when God's Word is heard, not only with exegetical and theological understanding, but with the whole heart, the whole being, when one is steadfast before the self-disclosure of the heart of God despite fire and night.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr (1968)

God , Religion , History , Understanding

“If there are any other holy writings beside the Bible, then Christianity is reduced to simply another philosophy like Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. To me, Christ and His Word are the only way, the only truth and the only life.”

Kip McKean (1954) minister

In response to his professor stating that the Bible is not the only inspired Word of God, 1957.

Life , Truth , Way , Christ

“It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

World , Way , Nature , Fish

“Today is fair. Tomorrow may be overcast with clouds. My words are like the stars that never change.”

Chief Seattle (1786–1866) Duwamish chief

Misattributed

Star , Change

“Consciousness, thoughts, are traveling through space in your head; we are traveling through space on this beautiful biosphere, Earth. If consciousness can traverse inner space, then perhaps it can traverse outer space. Perhaps we are as connected by consciousness as we are by the air that we all breathe. The air we inhale through the holes in our faces which tumbles into our lungs and blood, which travels through our hearts, which forms the words we speak, the air which we exhale, which is connected to all air, an unbroken entity, like all the water in all the rivers in the world, leading to the sea, touching one another.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

World , Beauty , Travel , Water

“And so for the remaining two hours of the meeting, Mr. Delgado and I sat in the front and directed the discussion. Or rather he directed it and I pretended I had an equal voice. A pattern quickly emerged in which my words would be greeted by silence and chilly looks; then Mr. Delgado would rephrase what I had said, as if interpreting from female to male language, with the added weight of an American accent.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

“The Empire Pool” Conclave: A Journal of Character, Issue 5, (Spring, 2013)
2010-

Silence

“Tacitus. And all those words that are obscure only once.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further, it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objectives of tektology are basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all other sciences, and of all human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method: that is, it is interested only in the mode of organization of this subject matter.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Variant: Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objective of tektology is basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all the other sciences and of all the human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method, that is, it is interested only in the modes of organization of this subject matter.
Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. iii

Law , Nature , Universe , Science

“I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Bob Dylan Interview http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/65-aug.htm by Nora Ephron & Susan Edmiston (1965)

“He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Men , Pain , Truth , World

“Flaming torches arching from hand to hand, the silken rolling of flesh on flesh, tautened wire vibrating to the human word, ideogrammatic gestures of fear, love, and rage, the mathematical grace of bodies moving through space—all seemed revealed as shadows on the void, the pauvre panoply of man’s attempt to transcend the universe of space and time through the transmaterial purity of abstract form.
Yet beyond this noble dance of human art, the highest expression of our spirit’s striving to transcend the realm of time and form, lay that which could not be encompassed by the artifice of man. From nothing are we born, to nothing do we go; the universe we know is but the void looped back upon itself, and form is but illusion’s final veil.
We touch that which lies beyond only in those fleeting rare moments when the reality of form dissolves—through molecule and charge, the perfection of the meditative trance, orgasmic ego-loss, transcendent peaks of art, mayhap the instant of our death.
Vraiment, is not the history of man from pigments smeared on the walls of caves to our present starflung age, our sciences and arts, our religions and our philosophies, our cultures and our noble dreams, our heroics and our darkest deeds, but the dance of spirit round this central void, the striving to transcend, and the deadly fear of same?”

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 10 (p. 117)

Love , Death , Age , Fear

“.. Africa: it's a magic word that lends itselfs to suppositions and sets amateur explorers to dreaming. I want to try to be 'at home' on this bit of foreign [Arab] soil.”

Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876) French painter

as quoted by Sarah Anderson, in Between Sea and Sahara: An Orientalist Adventure, Eugène Fromentin, (1859) - in 'Preface'; transl. Blake Robinson; publisher I.B. Tauris 2004, p. 4

Dreams , Home

“Poetry in America is no longer a dirty word. While it is still far from the center of the culture, it is moving slowly inward from the margins. I believe more and more people are shedding their outmoded notions of poetry as an exotic hobby--the result of bad teaching and worse public image problems--and coming to the realization that poetry is about their lives. Poetry is about them.”

Billy Collins (1941) American poet

Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry

People , Problem

“During the later part of the 19th century, it was believed that a sound of change affected the whole of a language simultaneously: one sound system would smoothly develop into the next, and all words which contained a particular sound would be affected in the same way.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 359

Way , Change , Parting

“Peace may sound simple — one beautiful word — but it requires everything we have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: U S Congress Congressional Record, V. 151, PT. 6, April 21, 2005 to May 5, 2005 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=feq-KS57zeUC&pg=PA7471, Government Printing Office, 2009 , p. 7471

Peace , Beauty , Dreams

“History, in other words, is just a device to be used by well-paid boobherds to drive the American cattle in bovine content to their pastures or to the abattoir.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Price of the Head, Instauration magazine (March 1980)
1970s, 1980s

History

“I have…a terrible need…shall I say the word?…of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Quoting Vincent van Gogh, p. 217
Cosmos (1980)

Religion , Star , Painting , Night

“Everybody's word is worth Nobody's taking.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"That what Everybody Says must be True".
Sketches from Life (1846)

“When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 41-42

Death , Question , Time , Dead

“In great organizations, a leader’s words and actions model what really matters, and as a result, everyone gets on the same page and pulls together.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 26.
On the Importance of Culture