Quotes about wording (9378 quotes, page 69)

“Death is not "an eternal sleep!" Citizens! efface from the tomb that motto, graven by sacrilegious hands, which spreads over all nature a funereal crape, takes from oppressed innocence its support, and affronts the beneficent dispensation of death! Inscribe rather thereon these words: "Death is the commencement of immortality!"”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Last speech to the National Convention http://www.bartleby.com/268/7/24.html (26 July 1794)

Death , Support , Nature , Sleep

“Not one word is said here of acausality, wave mechanics, indeterminacy relations, complementarity, … etc. Why doesn’t he talk about what he knows instead of trespassing on the professional philosopher’s preserves? Ne sutor supra crepidam. On this I can cheerfully justify myself: because I do not think that these things have as much connection as is currently supposed with a philosophical view of the world.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Source: My View of the World (1951), pp. vii-viii

World , Thinking

“As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts. Give us strength, too - strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces. And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, Prayer on D-Day (1944)

Courage , Support , Effort , Waiting

“Good-bye to the game all the spoils, the adrenaline rush
Your blood boils, you in a spot knowin' cops could rush
you in the drop, you so easy to touch
No two days are alike, except the 1st and 15th pretty much
And trust, is a word you seldom hear from us
Hustlers, we don't sleep, we rest one eye up
And a drought could define a man when the well dries up
You learn the worth of water
Without work you thirst 'til you die, yup!”

Jay-Z (1969) American rapper, businessman, entrepreneur, record executive, songwriter, record producer and investor

December 4th
The Black Album (2003)

Game , Sleep , Learning , Water

“It feels wild, you know, because in the beginning I never thought it was going to really happen. It's all in Turkish, you know, and nobody understands a word. But I think it's a groove. It's the kisses that are universal.”

Tarkan (1972) Turkish singer

Tarkan finds his moves take him across borders, CNN Worldbeat, August 9, 1999 http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Music/9908/09/tarkan.wb/index.html,
About his hit single Şımarık

Feeling , Understanding , Kiss , Thinking

“Repentance, tolerance, forgiveness and sharing to name a few, are some divinely empowered words and processes without which it is difficult to see, how we could be here today as an active member of the international community.”

Josefa Vosanibola Fijian politician

Speech to the House of Representatives, 12 August 2005

Communication , Forgiveness

“Merz paintings are abstract works of art. The word 'Merz' essentially means the totality of all imaginable materials that can be used for artistic purposes and technically the principle that all of these individual materials have equal value. Merz art makes use not just of paint and canvas, brush and palette, but all the materials visible to the eye and all tools needed.... the wheel off a pram, wire mesh, string and cotton balls – these are factors of equal value to paints. The artist creates by choosing, distributing and reshaping the materials.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1910s
Source: 'Merz Painting' (1919); as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 91.

Art , Imagination , Painting

“Sandra let her words fly on an arrow of certainty. "I know the whereabouts of a bona fide extra terrestrial."”

Vanna Bonta book Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel

Source: Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel (1995), Ch. 28

Flying

“The Catholic writer understands the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge--intuitive, holistic, and experiential. Art is a form of knowing--distinct and legitimate--rooted in feeling and delight--that discovers, in the words of Jacques Maritain, "The splendor of the secrets of being radiating into intelligence.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

34
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Truth , Secret , Beauty , Art

“We are deeply unified in our support of basic principles: our belief in stability in our financial structure, in our determination we must have fiscal responsibility, in our determination not to establish and operate a paternalistic sort of government where a man's initiative is almost taken away from him by force. Only in the last few weeks, I have been reading quite an article on the experiment of almost complete paternalism in a friendly European country. This country has a tremendous record for socialistic operation, following a socialistic philosophy, and the record shows that their rate of suicide has gone up almost unbelievably and I think they were almost the lowest nation in the world for that. Now, they have more than twice our rate. Drunkenness has gone up. Lack of ambition is discernible on all sides.. Therefore, with that kind of example, let's always remember Lincoln's admonition. Let's do in the federal Government only those things that people themselves cannot do at all, or cannot so well do in their individual capacities. Now, my friends, I know that these words have been repeated to you time and time again until you're tired of them. But I ask you only this, to contemplate them and remember this--Lincoln added another sentence to that statement. He said that in all those things where the individual can solve his own problems the Government ought not to interfere, for all are domestic affairs and this comprehends the things that the individual is normally concerned with, because foreign affairs does belong to the President by the Constitution--and they are things that really require constant governmental action.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

July 27, 1960 Remarks at the Republican National Committee Breakfast, Morrison Hotel, Chicago, Illinois http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=11891#ixzz1fU73Watz
1960s

People , World , Support , Problem

“By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Art , Feeling

“Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), Apology

Death , Pleasure , Fear , Hope

“In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths

“But despite the clarion words of the Manifesto, the demonic note was not a call for a revolution of communism; it was a cry born only of frustration and despair.”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VI, Karl Marx, p. 128

Communication , Cry , Despair

“Anarchists generally make use if the word "State" to mean all the collection of institutions, political, legislative, judicial, military, financial, etc., by means of which management of their own affairs, the guidance of their personal conduct, and the care of ensuring their own safety are taken from the people and confided to certain individuals, and these, whether by usurpation or delegation, are invested with the right to make laws over and for all, and to constrain the public to respect them, making use of the collective force of the community to this end.”

Errico Malatesta book Anarchy

Anarchy (1891)

People , Law , Confidence , Communication

“He had never been sure but that there might be something to the doctrines he had preached as an evangelist. Perhaps God really had dictated every word of the Bible. Perhaps there really was a hell of burning sulphur. Perhaps the Holy Ghost really was hovering around watching him and reporting. But he knew with serenity that all of his New Thoughts, his theosophical utterances, were pure and uncontaminated bunk. No one could deny his theories because none of his theories meant anything. It did not matter what he said, so long as he kept them listening; and he enjoyed the buoyancy of power as he bespelled his classes with long, involved, fruity sentences rhapsodic as perfume advertisements.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

God , Hell

“There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Character
1880s, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883)

Men , Truth

“We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

School , Learning , Time

“Reading the Bible will help you get to know the word, but it's when you put it down and live your life that you get to know the author.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 90

Life , Reading , Help

“Greed: a word commonly used by liberals, low achievers, anti-capitalists and society's losers to denigrate, shame and discredit those who have acquired superior job skills and decision making capabilities and who, through application of those job skills, achieve success.”

Neal Boortz (1945) American author, journalist, and radio host

Quoted, without citation, in O'Boyle's Quotes, Jokes & Anecdotes (2012), p. 25
Attributed

Decision , Success

“In some circles where very heavy people think they have very heavy brains, words like "charming" and "clever" and "pretty" are all put-downs; all the lighter things in life, which are the most important things, are put down.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 4: Beauty

Life , People , Thinking

“Our knowledge of human nature is for the most part empirical; and it would often be better, if, instead of endeavouring to say some new things ourselves, we were to confirm without more words the sayings of another.”

Arthur Helps (1813–1875) British writer

Source: Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd. 1901, p.19.

Nature , Knowledge , Parting

“There's a dream where the contents are visible
Where the poetic champions compose
Will you breathe not a word of this secrecy, and
Will you still be my special rose?”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Queen of the Slipstream
Song lyrics, Poetic Champions Compose (1987)

Dreams

““William Henry, when you were my student you honored me by noting down my words and philosophical maunderings. What said I on the subject of hate?”
“A strong man hates no one, is enraged with no one,” whispered William.
Spinoza continued. “He who lives under the guidance of reason endeavors as much as possible to repay hatred with love and nobleness. He who wished to avenge injuries by reciprocal hatred will live in misery. Hatred is increased by reciprocated hatred, and, on the contrary, can be demolished by love.””

Melinda M. Snodgrass (1951) American writer

Source: Queen's Gambit Declined (1989), Chapter 17 (p. 224)

Love , Hate , Strong

“The distinction between micro- and macroinventions is useful because, as historians of technology emphasize, the word first is hazardous in this literature.. Many technological breakthroughs had a history that began before the event generally regarded as “the invention,” and almost all macroinventions required subsequent improvements to make them operational. Yet in a large number of cases, one or two identifiable events were crucial. Without such breakthroughs technological progress would eventually fizzle out.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 14

History , Literature

“He is the most gentle-looking and amiable of men. Every word and look indicate sincerity of heart, even to guilelessness.”

William H. Seward (1801–1872) American lawyer and politician

Journal entry (27 February 1849) on President Zachary Taylor, published in The Autobiography of William H. Seward (1877).

Men , Heart , Sincerity

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”

John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) English linguist

Cited in: [Kenneth Church, 2007, A Pendulum Swung too Far, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ldc/swung-too-far.pdf, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 6, 4, 5]
"A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955." 1957

“In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book I, Dedication, sec. 22.
Naturalis Historia

“The teacher thus needs a basic education in dogma and asceticism. Apologetics is certainly also good, but the former seems more important to me: ready arguments, as right as they may be, often do not have penetrating force. But she whose soul is formed through the truths of faith — and I call this ascetic formation — finds words which are proper for this human being and for this moment respectively.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life (1928)

Truth , Education , Faith , Soul

“I can conceive no punishment so dreadful as keeping perpetual watch on our words, lest they betray what they mean to conceal; to know no unguarded moment — no careless gaiety — to pine for the confidence which yet we dare not bestow — to tremble, lest that some hidden meaning lurk in a phrase which only our own sickly fancy could torture into bearing such — to have suspicion become a second nature — and to shrink every morning from the glad sunshine, for we know not what a day may bring forth : the wheel of Ixion were a tender mercy compared to such a state.”

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

No.12. The Heart of Mid Lothian — EFFIE DEANS.
Literary Remains

Confidence , Nature

“Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language.”

Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) American historian

Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 2, Athenian Demagogues, p. 44

Evil

“Like all great churches, that are not mere store-houses of theology, Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the deepest man ever felt,— the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic formula of infinity,— the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to Unity beyond space; the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the energy, intelligence and purpose of God. Thomas Aquinas and the schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their church is another chapter. In act, all man's work ends there;— mathematics, physics, chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may invent,— to this favor come at last, as religion and philosophy did before science was born.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

God , Religion , Intelligence , Mathematics

“English never met a word it didn't like.”

Anu Garg (1967) Indian author

On English's propensity to borrow words from other languages, quoted in * 2000-12-01
Smithsonian
WARNING: Log-o-phil-ia is Addictive
Rudolph
Chelminski

“Our speech has ceased to speak, it shouts; it says cute, not beautiful, colossal, not great; it cannot find the right word any more, because the word is no longer the designation of an object, but the echo of some kind of gossip about the object.”

Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) German polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist

“Zum Unterrichtsgesetze,” as cited in The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), p. 31

Beauty

“Is faith so cheap, my child? Faith is the last word. If one has faith, the goal is practically reached.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[The Temple Dedication Souvenir]

Faith

“Marina was about eight years older than my sister Tencha, so this made her about eighteen years older than me. She was presently a reporter for the New York Times. When she was in high school, she’d won the Underwood Typewriter typing contest, doing well over a hundred words a minute without a single mistake, setting a national record. She attributed her fast hands to her cotton-picking days as a young girl in Scottsdale, Arizona.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

School , Girl , Sister , Time

“…[B]eing part of The L Word made me realize how much more television can be that what I had experienced in my lifetime in terms of being able to be of service to people. I had so many fans come up to me who were really deeply appreciative of the show and what it had meant for them and their own sense of identity and their own sense of inclusion in our society and in our culture.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview with TV Drama Watch (4 February 2011) http://tvdramawatch.com/2011/02/04/the-chicago-code-interview-with-jennifer-beals/.

People , Sense , Parting

“God's word is not just to be heard and repeated, it is to be breathed, lived, and emulated with each action.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 26

God

“The inverse relationship between the bold promises and the effectiveness of the proposed solutions, the frustrations with the so-called system, the subtle and not-so-subtle bigotry and animus towards members of my race made radicals and nationalists of many of us. Yes, I understand the reasons why this is attractive. But it is precisely this -- in its historic form, not its present-day diluted form that I have rejected. My question was whether as an individual I truly believed that I was the equal of individuals who were white. This I had answered with a resounding "yes" in 1964 during my sophomore year in the seminary. And that answer continues to be yes. Accordingly, my words and my deeds are consistent with this answer.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Understanding , Question

“And it is just as important for the Republicans to read Jefferson's words because they are as bad and perhaps worse than the Democrats. As the decades of Democratic abuse of America's young unfolded, the Republicans have been utterly craven, seeking to save the young, the Constitution, and the republic with words alone when in opposition, and doing virtually nothing substantive to arrest the republic's decline when they hold power. Today, the Republicans cower, mumble, and equivocate when called 'extremists' by those heroic Democratic champions of murdering the unborn, they follow like murmuring sheep the shrill martial words of Senators Graham and McCain and so get young Americans uselessly killed and maimed in wars that are either unnecessary or ones they have no intention of winning, and they are barely brave enough to raise economic points and words of I-told-you-so to oppose the coming, liberty-killing indentured servitude of America's young in the name of Obamacare. Indeed, the Republicans seem increasingly like those gassy, self-righteous, and hell-bound rhetoricians.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in "Obama and his party offer America's young … death, misery, and slavery" http://non-intervention.com/1143/obama-and-his-party-offer-america%E2%80%99s-young-%E2%80%A6-death-misery-and-slavery/ (2013), by M. Scheuer, Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention.
2010s

War , Hell , Reading

“My distinction is, that in incorrect wills the Court may take liberties, but that if the words are correct they have no power to make any alteration.”

Sir Francis Buller, 1st Baronet (1746–1800) British judge

Doe et dem. Dacre v. Dacre (1798), 2 Bos. & Pull. 260.

“All those words of praise they use for novels – spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?”

Howard Jacobson (1942) British author and journalist

Interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, April 2003. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;$sessionid$FUVRY4DIEVBSTQFIQMFCFF4AVCBQYIV0?xml=/arts/2003/04/27/bojac27.xml&sSheet=/arts/2003/04/27/bomain.html

“The criticism of ideology must therefore invert the linking of causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze: far from being the positive cause of social antagonism, the Jew is just an embodiment of a certain blockage - of the impossibility which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogenous totality. Far from being the positive cause of social negativity, the Jew is a point at which social negativity as such assumes another formula of the basic procedure of the criticism of ideology, supplementing the one given above: to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility. Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it projects this internal negativity into the figure of the Jew. In other words, what is excluded from the Symbolic (from the frame of the corporalist socio-symbolic order) returns in the Real as a paranoid construction of the Jew.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

143
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Nature

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Understanding

“The word is clear only to the kind who on peak or plain, from dark northern ice-fields to the hot wet jungles, through all wine and want, through lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, are governed by the unknown gods, and though each man knows the law, no man may give tongue to it.”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

"The Clan of No Name" (1899); published in the anthology Wounds in the Rain (1900)

God , Truth , Law , Light

“A poem therefore is to be defined as a structure of words whose sound constitutes a rhythmical unity, complete in itself, irrefragable, unanalyzable, completing its symbolic references within the ambit of its sound effects.”

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

What is a Poem - Endword - Selected Poems (1926)

“There is no truth which cannot be given in fifty words; the truth is always concise.”

Barry N. Malzberg book Beyond Apollo

Source: Beyond Apollo (1972), Chapter 16

Truth

“Two words of such a book, though possessing no peculiar signification, if met with in the dullest sentence, are enough: they call up, what has been finely termed, the "lightning of the mind." We feel an instantaneous kindness and reverence towards an author (together with a high opinion of his discrimination) who cites as it were the very language of our dreams—the secret converse of our own invisible spirit. We are almost startled at its being made public, and fancy that we have been at some time overheard reading. He is forthwith admitted a member of our heart's privy council. His hard words and bad reasoning are forgiven: we shut our ears to his angular periods—remembering only that his habits and desires, his sympathies, perceptions and enjoyments, are under the same master-key as our own—that he has struck into the same path, drank at the same brook, mused upon the same bank, and plucked almost the same leaf with ourselves.”

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

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

Secret , Books , Dreams , Feeling

“If to state this case is not to decide it, the law has departed further from the meaning of language than is appropriate for a government that is supposed to rule (and to be restrained) through the written word.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

United States v. Rodriguez-Moreno, 526 U.S. 275 (1998) (Scalia, dissenting).
1990s

Law

“Meryl Streep, in her Protestant way, is stuck on words; she flashes clever accents as a mask for her deeper failures. (And she cannot deliver a Jewish line; she destroyed Nora Ephron’s snappy dialogue in Hearburn.) Streep’s work doesn’t travel. Try dubbing her for movie houses in India: there’d be nothing left, just that bony, earnest horse face moving its lips. Imagine, on the other hand, lesser technicians like Hedy Lammarr, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner: these women have an international and universal appeal, crossing the centuries. They would have been beautiful in Egypt, Greece, Rome, medieval Burgundy, or eighteenth-century Paris. Susan Hayward played Bathsheba. Try to picture Streep in a Bible epic! Streep is incapable of playing the great legendary or mythological roles. She has no elemental power, no smouldering sensuality.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 16

Women , Beauty , Way , Travel

“In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 18 (p. 313)

“Every word, every line, every thought is prompted by the age we live in, with all its circumstances, its ties, its efforts, its past and present. It is impossible to act or think independently and arbitrarily. This is comforting in a way. To the individual, the collective experience of the age represents a bond – and also, in a sense, security; there will always be possibilities even in disaster.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

Age , Way , Thinking , Sense

“There has to be a constant flow of energy to maintain the organization of the system and to ensure its survival. Equilibrium is another word for death.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

Source: Complexity and Postmodernism (1998), p. 4; as cited in Richard Andrews et al. (2012, p. 129)

Death

“The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we look back only over the last century, was there anything more responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of Rousseau, fanned by the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others, just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of Kerensky— flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people with the east wind? That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning, is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant mob and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the Cambridge Union (March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 95-96.
1924

People , Imagination , Training

“I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament — temperament is the word — I know nothing.”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote of Degas in conversation with George Moore, later quoted by Moore in Impressions and Opinions (1891)
1876 - 1895

Art , Study

“The two maxims of any great man at court are always to keep his countenance and never to keep his word.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

http://books.google.com/books?id=eRwwAAAAMAAJ&q="The+two+maxims+of+any+great+man+at+court+are+always+to+keep+his+countenance+and+never+to+keep+his+word"&pg=PA262#v=onepage
Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

“I have this theory about words: There’s a thousand ways to say "Pass the salt." It could mean, you know, "Can I have some salt?" or it could mean, "I love you." It could mean "I’m very annoyed with you" – really, the list could go on and on. Words are little bombs, and they have a lot of energy inside them.”

Christopher Walken (1943) American actor

Shout Magazine, in the issue from August, in the article "Cookin' with Christopher Walken" (2001)

Love , Way

“The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive "policies" and "Plans" of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word "socialism", but what else can one call it?”

H. G. Wells book The New World Order

The New World Order (1939)

Success

“It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful, it is marvelously ineffable.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

Beauty , Personality

“One thing you must know: Just as there is no comparison between actually hearing the sound of harp-strings sweetly plucked and listening to someone talking about it, so too there is no comparison between words which are received in pure grace, issuing from a living heart, spoken by living lips, and those self-same words committed to dry parchment — especially words in German. For these somehow grow chill, losing their vitality like roses cut. For the enchanting melody which, more than anything else, moves human hearts, then fades away, so that the words are received now into the dryness of dry hearts. No harp-strings were ever so sweet but, when stretched across dry timber, they fall silent. An unloving heart can no more understand a love-filled speaker than a German an Italian. Therefore, an eager enquirer should hasten to the out-flowing streams of these sweet teachings so that she may see and observe them at their source in all its living and wondrous beauty – that is, the in-flowing of present grace which is able to restore dead hearts to life.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom

Love , Life , Beauty , Understanding

“As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed He in all, and especially in these sweet words where He saith: I IT AM. That is to say, I IT AM, the Might and the Goodness of the Fatherhood; I IT AM, the Wisdom of the Motherhood; I IT AM, the Light and the Grace that is all blessed Love: I IT AM, the Trinity, I IT AM, the Unity: I am the sovereign Goodness of all manner of things. I am that maketh thee to love: I am that maketh thee to long: I IT AM, the endless fulfilling of all true desires.
For there the soul is highest, noblest, and worthiest, where it is lowest, meekest, and mildest: and of this Substantial Ground we have all our virtues in our Sense-part by gift of Nature, by helping and speeding of Mercy and Grace: without the which we may not profit.”

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

Summations, Chapter 59

Love , Wisdom , God , Soul

““You want a motive, William? I’ve got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it’s what’s expected of us.”
“Right!” said Sverre. “We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you’ll come out of this war without a single medal.””

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 7, “In Which Our Hero Makes a Strategic Decision and Acquires a Reason Not to Curse God and Die” (p. 80)

War , People , Motivation , Dead

“The first charge against 'measurement', in the fundamental axioms of quantum mechanics, is that it anchors there the shifty split of the world into 'system' and 'apparatus'. A second charge is that the word comes loaded with meaning from everyday life, meaning which is entirely inappropriate in the quantum context.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

Against 'measurement' (1990)

Life , World

“Music is the best way that I know to say the things that are difficult to say in English. Words get in the way sometimes.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

Reported in Jay Babcock, " MUSIC IS NEVER WRONG: A visit with Josh Homme & John Paul Jones of Them Crooked Vultures http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/10/15/them-crooked-vultures/", Arthur Magazine (October 15, 2009).

Music , Way

“It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)

Thinking , Change

“It has been thought, correctly and nicely, that everyone who is in peril will be helped. Practically this is implemented in the way that everyone who can say the word "asylum" is allowed to enter Europe and Finland, that word creates a subjective right to cross the border. Even for no proper reason, one gets a full investigation that lasts years, and if the preconditions for an asylum are not met, one can avoid coercive measures and thus stay in the country which he entered wrongly.”

Sauli Niinistö (1948) 12th president of Finland

President Niinistö commented the European refugee crisis while delivering an address to the Parliament of Finland on 3 February 2016.
Source: Tasavallan presidentti Sauli Niinistön puhe valtiopäivien avajaisissa 3.2.2016 http://www.presidentti.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=341374&nodeid=44810&contentlan=1&culture=fi Website of the President of Finland. Retrieved 13 July 2017.

Way , Help , Country

“It is due to him that the Roman concepts of public duty and service are still a living force among us. Historians have denied him the name of genius which they grant readily to Alexander and Julius and Napoleon; but if it be not genius to re-make and re-direct the world by a courageous realism and supreme powers of character and mind, then the word has no meaning in human speech..”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Augustus (1937)

World , Courage

“…when the test results came back, everything went silent. I don't know if it was from pure astonishment or the overwhelming gratitude of finally having an answer, but a lifetime of words all disappeared except for one. Epilepsy.”

DeBarra Mayo (1953) American martial artist

Living with Epilepsy, Stayhealthy.com, Nov. 9, 1999

Gratitude

“I really am interested but I find it hard to make the proper helpful noises. I'm terrible inadequate when it comes to sympathy. I feel things but I can't express them in words.”

Christopher Wood (writer) (1935–2015) English writer

Wood, Christopher. "Terrible Hard", Says Alice. London: Constable. 1970. (chapter 13)

Feeling , Help

“By making social hierarchies and the reproduction of these hierarchies appear based upon the hierarchy of ‘gifts’, merits, or skill established and ratified by its sanctions, or, in a word, by converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the educational system fulfils a function of legitimation which is more and more necessary to the perpetuation of the ‘social order’ as the evolution of the power relationship between classes tends more completely to exclude the imposition of a hierarchy based upon the crude and ruthless affirmation of the power relationship.”

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1973), p. 84

Education , Appearance

“Clive [Davis] tried to tell me that saying certain words in a song- or as he says, ‘putting some balls into it'- isn't bad, it's just strong emotion. Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did.”

Clay Aiken (1978) singer-songwriter, actor, record producer

Thinking , Strong , Change

“In arguing too, the parson owned his skill,
For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length, and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.”

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village

Source: The Deserted Village (1770), Line 211.

Learning

“Yet, wake again, I pray thee, wake;
My soul yet lives upon the chords —
My heart must breathe its wrongs, or break :
Yet can it find relief in words!”

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

(20th March 1824) Metrical Tales. Tale IV.— The Troubadour
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Soul , Heart

“I do not feel capable of writing a single word of counsel to those dear young people, more than to say that my heart goes out to every one of them, regardless of the fact that I have never seen them and may never do so. I want them to find Jesus, and make Him a daily, hourly, and momently part of themselves. O how I want them to get the fullest measure of happiness and success out of life. I want them to see the Great Creator in the smallest and apparently the most insignificant things about them. How I long for each one to walk and talk with the Great Creator through the things he has created. How I thank God every day that I can walk and talk with Him.”

George Washington Carver (1864–1943) botanist

George Washington Carver: In His Own Words http://books.google.es/books?id=JcncXGNSJQQC&hl=es&source=gbs_navlinks_s (1991), edited by Gary R. Kremer, University of Missouri Press, p. 135

Life , God , People , Feeling

“These words are being written in reply to the verbal message sent by you. I have been asked (by you) to tell (you) about suppression of the rebellion of Jats in the environs of Delhi.
The fact is that this recluse (meaning himself) has witnessed in the occult world the downfall of the Jats in the same way as that of the Marhatahs. I have also seen it in a dream that Muslims have taken possession of the forts and the country of the Jats, and that Muslims have become masters of those forts and that country as in the past. Most probably, the Ruhelas will occupy those Jat forts. This has been determined and decided in the most secret world. This recluse has not the shadow of a doubt about that. But the way that victory will be achieved is not yet clear. What is needed is prayers from those special servants of Allah who have been chosen for this purpose.
…But keep one thing in your mind, namely, that the Hindus who are apparently in your’s and your government’s employ, are inclined towards the enemies in their hearts. They do not want that the enemies be exterminated. They will try a thousand tricks in this matter, and endeavour in every way to show to your honour that the path of peace is more profitable.
Make up your mind not to listen to this group (the Hindu employees). If you disregard their advice, you will reach the height of fulfilment. This recluse knows of this (fulfilment) as if he is seeing it with his own eyes.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

To Najibuddaulah Translated from the Urdu version of K.A. Nizami, Shãh Walîullah Dehlvî ke Siyãsî Maktûbãt, Second Edition, Delhi, 1969, pp. 106-07.
From his letters

Secret , World , Peace , Dreams

“For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating side by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis. In general, aside from certain brilliant exceptions, Games with discordant, negative, or skeptical conclusions were unpopular and at times actually forbidden. This followed directly from the meaning the Game had acquired at its height for the players. It represented an elite, symbolic form of seeking for perfection, a sublime alchemy, an approach to that Mind which beyond all images and multiplicities is one within itself — in other words, to God. Pious thinkers of earlier times had represented the life of creatures, say, as a mode of motion toward God, and had considered that the variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Similarly, the symbols and formulas of the Glass Bead Game combined structurally, musically, and philosophically within the framework of a universal language, were nourished by all the sciences and arts, and strove in play to achieve perfection, pure being, the fullness of reality. ”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Life , God , Hostility , World

“Bill Manders: I, too, am pro life but I'm also pro choice, do you understand what I say when I mean that.
Sharron Angle: I'm pro responsible choice. There is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kinds of good choices.
Bill Manders: Is there any reason at all for an abortion?
Sharron Angle: Not in my book.
Bill Manders: So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?
Sharron Angle: You know, I'm a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.”

Sharron Angle (1949) Former member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007

interview with talk radio host Bill Manders, January 2010
Sharron Angle Opposes Abortion Even With Rape, Incest: 'God Has A Plan'
2010-06-29
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/29/sharron-angle-opposes-abo_n_629371.html

Life , God , Books , Faith

“The linga he raised was the stone of Somnath, for soma means the moon and natha means master, so that the whole word means master of the moon. The image was destroyed by the Prince Mahmud, may God be merciful to him! - AH 416. He ordered the upper part to be broken and the remainder to be transported to his residence, Ghaznin, with all its coverings and trappings of gold, jewels, and embroidered garments. Part of it has been thrown into the hippodrome of the town, together with the Cakrasvamin, an idol of bronze, that had been brought from Taneshar. Another part of the idol from Somanath lies before the door of the mosque of Ghaznin, on which people rub their feet to clean them from dirt and wet.”

Al-Biruni book Alberuni's India

E.C. Sachau (tr.), Alberuni's India, New Delhi Reprint, 1983
From Alberuni's India

God , People , Parting

“"The parts I like, well…" He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. The parts I don't like--well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word."”

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Part IV, "In Time of Plague" (p. 357)
Dhalgren (1975)

Parting

“"When an alluring woman comes in at the door," warningly traced the austere Kien-fi on the margin of his well-known essay, "discretion may be found up the chimney". It is incredible that beneath this ever-timely reminder an obscure disciple should have added the words: "The wiser the sage, the more profound the folly."”

Ernest Bramah book Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree

The Story of the Poet Lao Ping, Chun Shin's Daughter Fa, and the Fighting Crickets
Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree (1940)

Time

“Moved by a generous eagerness to turn men's attention to the power which dwelt in circumstances, Mr. Owen devised the instructive phrase, that "man's character was formed for him and not by him." He used the unforgettable inference that "man is the creature of circumstances." The school of material improvers believed they could put in permanent force right circumstances. The great dogma was their charter of encouragement. To those who hated without thought It seemed a restrictive doctrine to be asked to admit that there were extenuating circumstances in the career of every rascal. To the clergy with whom censure was a profession, and who held that all sin was wilful, man being represented as the "creature of circumstances," appeared a denial of moral responsibility. When they were asked to direct hatred against error, and pity the erring — who had inherited so base a fortune of incapacity and condition — they were wroth exceedingly, and said it would be making a compromise with sin. The idea of the philosopher of circumstances was that the very murderer in his last cell had been born with a staple in his soul, to which the villainous conditions of his life had attached an unseen chain, which had drawn him to the gallows, and that the rope which was to hang him was but the visible part. Legislators since that day have come to admit that punishment is justifiable only as far as it has preventive influence. To use the great words of Hobbes, "Punishment regardeth not the past, only the future."”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

Life , Men , Hate , School

“Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 342

Death , People , World

“Up there!'. Wonderful words! All my life has been dominated by these antagonisms: high and low. In my childhood I tried desperately to be high up.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964)

Life , Childhood

“Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could — I'm searching for the right word — could, could die.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On his return as interim CEO of Apple, as quoted in TIME magazine (18 August 1997)
1990s

Search

“Nobody ever wrote so well so fast as Jim. One year he wrote, and we published, nine novels. It was an obsession. Back in 1941, his father had been in an asylum in Oklahoma City, begging Jim to get him out. Jim needed money to get him out, so he said to his father, "Give me a month, and I'll raise the money." His father brightened, because Jim never went back on his word. Jim took a bus to New York City and went door to door to the publishing houses, asking for money for a hotel room, a rented typewriter and meals so he could write a novel. Finally, at Modern Age, they took a chance, and in 10 days he wrote a novel. But things being what they are in publishing, it was a month plus one day before Jim got his advance. The same day, a telegram arrived. His father had committed suicide, ripping the excelsior out of his mattress and stuffing it down his throat. When Jim would drink he would sometimes cry and say, "Why couldn't he have waited another day? Didn't he trust me?"”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Jim Thompson, 1906 - 1977," in The Los Angeles Times (May 1, 1977), p. X3
Other Topics

Money , Age , Drink , Suicide

“The main result reached by the new theory was that the classical mechanics can be made to account for the whole range of spectral phenomena, provided entirely new meanings are given to such symbols as p and q which had hitherto been taken to describe the position and motion of the electron…. The most significant of the new properties is that the product pq is no longer the same as the product qp - in other words the order in which the two factors are multiplied together is no longer a matter of indifference. The difference between pq and qp is found to be always the same, being Planck's constant h multiplied by a numerical multiplier.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Indifference

“As years went by the boy grew high
And the village looked on in awe
They’d never seen anything like
The boy with the moon and star before
And people would ride from far and wide
just to seek the word he spread
"I'll tell you everything I've learned,"
And "Love", is all he said.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Boy With A Moon And Star On His Head
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Love , People , Star , Boy

“My work in this area started around 1950 when I was still with the Cowles Commission. I was writing a more or less expository paper dealing with activity analysis…and happened to use the term “decentralization,” which was then often applied to the market mechanism as a sort of a selling point. But when I used the word “decentralization” I thought I should explain what I meant. So I made a footnote mark, went to the bottom of the page, and began writing, “By decentralization we mean…” But then it struck me that I did not know what we meant by decentralization. That was the beginning of many years of work trying to clarify the concept, because I thought that if we think this property is so important, we should be able to define what it is.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Source: David Warsh, " The Road to a System that Works (Without Shooting People) http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2007.10.21/69.html" at economicprincipals.com, October 21, 2007.

Thinking

“It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time.”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

Thoughts on his first parachute jump in The Spirit of St Louis (1953)

Love , Life , Death , Men

“The analytical approach employed by both BSP and BISC is "top down". The implications of the words "top down" are multiple and varied, and all apply to these analysis. For instance:”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Top down implies scope - that is, looking at the business as a whole as opposed to looking at pieces or subparts of it.
Business Systems Planning and Business Information Control Study: A comparison, 1982

“I think about my father being called 'boy,' my uncle being called 'boy,' my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called 'boy.' So I questioned myself: 'What does a black man have to do before he's given the respect as a man?' So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybody's mouth is 'Mr.”

Mr. T (1952) American actor and retired professional wrestler

That's a sign of respect that my father didn't get, that my brother didn't get, that my mother didn't get.
Attributed

Boy , Drink , Question , Thinking

“Certainly this man, such as I have described him, this loner who is gifted with an active imagination, traversing forever the vast desert of men, has a loftier aim than that of a simple idler, an aim more general than the passing pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for what one might be allowed to call modernity; for no better word presents itself to express the idea in question. What concerns him is to release the poetry of fashion from its historical trappings, to draw the eternal out of the transient.”

Charles Baudelaire Le Peintre de la vie moderne

A coup sûr, cet homme, tel que je l'ai dépeint, ce solitaire doué d'une imagination active, toujours voyageant à travers le grand désert d'hommes, a un but plus élevé que celui d'un pur flâneur, un but plus général, autre que le plaisir fugitif de la circonstance. Il cherche ce quelque chose qu'on nous permettra d'appeler la modernité; car il ne se présente pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer l'idée en question. Il s'agit, pour lui, de dégager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de poétique dans l'historique, de tirer l'éternel du transitoire.
IV: "La modernité" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Modernit%C3%A9
Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Men , Pleasure , Imagination , Idea

“Words matter. Words matter when you run for president. And they really matter when you are president.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

“I know procedures around here. And I know that there will still be Senate business conducted. But I will, for lack of a better word, screw things up.”

Harry Reid (1939) American politician

Source: threatening to obstruct the Senate if the Republicans used the nuclear option. Quoted in The Washington Post, December 13, 2004, GOP May Target Use of Filibuster http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59877-2004Dec12.html

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