Language

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  • It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear.
        Douglas Adams   Best?
  • For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and big words Bother me.
        Pooh's Little Instruction Book   Best?
  • TYPE, n. Pestilent bits of metal suspected of destroying civilization and enlightenment, despite their obvious agency in this incomparable dictionary.
        Ambrose Bierce   Best?
  • SLANG, n. The grunt of the human hog (_Pignoramus intolerabilis_) with an audible memory. The speech of one who utters with his tongue what he thinks with his ear, and feels the pride of a creator in accomplishing the feat of a parrot. A means (under Providence) of setting up as a wit without a capital of sense.
        Ambrose Bierce   Best?
  • The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
        Harriet Beecher Stowe   Best?
  • Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer. Be what you say; and, within the rules of prudence, say what you are.
        Alford   Best?
  • It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.
        William Shakespeare   Best?
  • By words the mind is winged.
        Aristophanes   Best?
  • The superior man is modest in his speech but exceeds in his actions.
        Confucious   Best?
  • We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing
        Ralph Waldo Emerson   Best?
  • No woman can be handsome by the force of features alone, any more that she can be witty by only the help of speech.
        Langston Hughes   Best?
  • Originality is not seen in single words or even sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
        Isaac Bashevis Singer   Best?
  • Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.
        Harold Geneen   Best?
  • When I say beautiful things, I'm not necessarily living them; when I live them, the beautiful thing is that words aren't necessary.
        Brock Tully   Best?
  • Words lead to deeds.... They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.
        Unknown   Best?
  • Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
        Rudyard Kipling   Best?
  • Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
        Mother Theresa   Best?
  • Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
        William Shakespeare   Best?
  • Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.
        Socrates   Best?
  • Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
        Isaac Bashevis Singer   Best?
  • We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
        Anna Sewell   Best?
  • Dance is the hidden language of the soul.
        Martha Graham   Best?
  • Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
        Thomas Carlyle   Best?
  • Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.
        Douglas Adams   Best?
  • In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
        Mark Twain   Best?
  • Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
        Christopher Morley   Best?
  • ASS, n. A public singer with a good voice but no ear. In Virginia City, Nevada, he is called the Washoe Canary, in Dakota, the Senator, and everywhere the Donkey. The animal is widely and variously celebrated in the literature, art and religion of every age and country; no other so engages and fires the human imagination as this noble vertebrate. Indeed, it is doubted by some (Ramasilus, _lib. II., De Clem._, and C. Stantatus, _De Temperamente_) if it is not a god; and as such we know it was worshiped by the Etruscans, and, if we may believe Macrobious, by the Cupasians also. Of the only two animals admitted into the Mahometan Paradise along with the souls of men, the ass that carried Balaam is one, the dog of the Seven Sleepers the other. This is no small distinction. From what has been written about this beast might be compiled a library of great splendor and magnitude, rivalling that of the Shakespearean cult, and that which clusters about the Bible. It may be said, generally, that all literature is more or less Asinine.
        Ambrose Bierce   Best?
  • MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators.
        Ambrose Bierce   Best?
  • The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. When we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do not have access to good libraries and bookstores, or to museums and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that opens doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundreds of words which most middle-class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or a magazine, or heard words used in other than rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.
        Peter S. Jennison   Best?
  • X in our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last as long as the language. X is the sacred symbol of ten dollars, and in such words as Xmas, Xn, etc., stands for Christ, not, as is popular supposed, because it represents a cross, but because the corresponding letter in the Greek alphabet is the initial of his name -- _Xristos_. If it represented a cross it would stand for St. Andrew, who "testified" upon one of that shape. In the algebra of psychology x stands for Woman's mind. Words beginning with X are Grecian and will not be defined in this standard English dictionary.
        Ambrose Bierce   Best?
  • If a person does good, most people will look for ulterior motives. People by training are very suspicious. Because most of the experiences they have had always had a condition attached, they don't expect others will do something just for the sake of doing it. Their belief systems just cannot accept others are capable of doing so. Our language is full of such sayings such as. "One hand washes the other." ---"You rub my back, I'll rub yours." In the study of one's personal language and self talk it can be observed that what one thinks and talks about to himself tends to become the deciding influences n his life. For what the mind attends to, the mind considers.
        Sidney Madwed   Best?
  • By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely.
        Karl Buhler   Best?
  • HEART, n. An automatic, muscular blood-pump. Figuratively, this useful organ is said to be the esat of emotions and sentiments -- a very pretty fancy which, however, is nothing but a survival of a once universal belief. It is now known that the sentiments and emotions reside in the stomach, being evolved from food by chemical action of the gastric fluid. The exact process by which a beefsteak becomes a feeling -- tender or not, according to the age of the animal from which it was cut; the successive stages of elaboration through which a caviar sandwich is transmuted to a quaint fancy and reappears as a pungent epigram; the marvelous functional methods of converting a hard-boiled egg into religious contrition, or a cream-puff into a sigh of sensibility -- these things have been patiently ascertained by M. Pasteur, and by him expounded with convincing lucidity. (See, also, my monograph, _The Essential Identity of the Spiritual Affections and Certain Intestinal Gases Freed in Digestion_ -- 4to, 687 pp.) In a scientific work entitled, I believe, _Delectatio Demonorum_ (John Camden Hotton, London, 1873) this view of the sentiments receives a striking illustration; and for further light consult Professor Dam's famous treatise on _Love as a Product of Alimentary Maceration_.
        Ambrose Bierce   Best?
  • Adoption comes from the heart, but the adoption process comes from the Law. You should follow your heart, but be sure you also follow the law.
        Irina O'Rear   Best?
  • I have been called the most powerful woman in the world, but I have on occasion lacked even the power of speech, because although we have crossed the threshold into a new century, there are still too many questions for which we have no answers.
        Madeleine K. Albright   Best?
  • Security is a process, not a product.
        Bruce Schneier   Best?
  • The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.
        Gustave Flaubert   Best?
  • James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning.
        Ayn Rand   Best?
  • Man's drive for self expression, which over centuries built his monuments, does not stay within set bounds; the creations, which yesterday were the detested and obscene, become the classics of today.
        Matthew Tobriner   Best?
  • Witness at all times. If necessary, use words.
        St. Francis of Assisi   Best?

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