Top 100 Dictionary Of Quotes
#1. I contend, most seriously, that there is a real need for a good, thick, complete-as-possible dictionary of 'What People Used to Call Things.'
Gary Jennings
#2. There ought to be a dictionary of smiles; somewere you can look them up and find out what they mean.
Tom Holt
#3. Love?' he asked himself, giving no sense of recognition for that word in the dictionary of his mind. It was the only battle he had lost in life, the only thing that had been snatched away from him, before he could even claim it.
Faraaz Kazi
#4. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
#5. Trickle-down theories do not address the legitimate aspirations of the poor. We must lift those at the bottom so that poverty is erased from the dictionary of modern India.
Pranab Mukherjee
#6. The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them.
Jerzy Kosinski
#7. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...
Julio Cortazar
#8. There is many a thing which the world calls disappointment; but there is no such thing in the dictionary of faith. What to others are disappointments are to believers intimations of the will of God.
John Newton
#9. Larousse Gastronomique is a veritable dictionary of cooking terms for the French kitchen. If a chef were allowed only one book, this would have to be it.
Mario Batali
#10. I have six or seven 'what to name the baby' books, the Oxford dictionary of names, and a fabulous tome that's 26 languages in simultaneous translation - French, German, all the European majors, plus Esperanto, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
Melanie Rawn
#11. In the dictionary of the seeker of truth there is no such thing as being "not successful." He is or should be an irrepressible optimist because of his immovable faith in the ultimate victory of Truth, which is God.
Mahatma Gandhi
#12. I'm simply not afraid. It's not in my dictionary of behaviour.
Werner Herzog
#13. Con-tu-ber-nal(noun). One who occupies
the same tent; a tent-fellow, comrade.
The thought of Percy Prewitt as my contubernal causes me to break out in hives.
-From the personal dictionary of
Caroline Trent
Julia Quinn
#14. The only way to learn a language properly, in fact, is to marry a man of that nationality. You get what they call in Europe a 'sleeping dictionary.' Of course, I have only been married five times, and I speak seven languages. I'm still trying to remember where I picked up the other two.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
#15. No," I said, louder this time. "I mean asscrown. The crown on top of the asshat that covers the asshole of the assclown. The very zenith in the hierarchy of asses," I said, as though reading from a dictionary of modern profanity.
Michelle Hodkin
#16. I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
Max Beerbohm
#17. Sorry & Thanks are the only two words in the dictionary of life wherein its presence connects two strangers, and its absence departs two loved ones.
Swati Jain
#19. He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds - mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh - it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.
Audrey Niffenegger
#21. If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.
Vladimir Nabokov
#22. I don't think that ambition should not be in the dictionary of entrepreneurs. But our ambition should be realistic. You have to realise that you can't do everything.
Mukesh Ambani
#23. In the dictionary of satyagraha, there is no enemy.
Mahatma Gandhi
#24. She looks like she's holding in a dictionary of bad words or a nuclear war.
Jandy Nelson
#25. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.
The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
Richard Dawkins
#26. In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of illogic and inconsistency.
Paul Johnson
#27. Thaumatomane: a person possessed of a passion for magic and wonders, Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson.
Susanna Clarke
#29. Impossible," said he, "is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.
Napoleon Hill
#30. DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Gustave Flaubert
#32. To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
Mark Strand
#33. Only a person with the true heart of a dictionary-writer would be lying in bed, three days after being stabbed in the gut, worrying about his P's.
Kristin Cashore
#34. What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
Sylvia Plath
#35. A great many years ago I purchased a fine dictionary. The first thing I did with it was to turn to the word "impossible," and neatly clip it out of the book. That would not be an unwise thing for you to do.
Napoleon Hill
#36. Those who are absent, by its means become present: correspondence is the consolation of life. - VOLTAIRE, Philosophical Dictionary
Colin Dexter
#37. When I see a dictionary on my desk I feel like I'm looking at some strange dog leaving a twisty piece of poop on our lawn out back.
Haruki Murakami
#38. Mistake is a single page in a part of Life ...
but Relation is a book of dictionary
So don't lose a full Book for a single page.
Rubeccapalm Rose
#39. I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Zadie Smith
#40. Now what is a wedding? Well, Webster's dictionary describes a wedding as the process of removing weeds from one's garden.
Homer
#41. Jason straightened his shirt. "What's 'chauvinistic' mean?"
"It's in the dictionary next to a picture of your father," muttered
Kyle.
Kathleen Peacock
#42. The word 'Sudra' which means 'Son of prostitute' should not find a place even in the history hereafter. We will not allow it to find a place in the dictionary or encycl
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#43. Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.
Anthony Marra
#44. We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.
Mervyn Peake
#45. Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
Ambrose Bierce
#46. It strikes me that I need to throw out the dictionary the world gave me about what it means to be a mother, a wife, a person of faith, an artist, and a woman and write my own.
Glennon Doyle Melton
#47. Because you're mine and sharing isn't part of my dictionary.
Priya Kanaparti
#48. If you look up the definition of greatness in the dictionary, it will say Michael Jordan.
Elgin Baylor
#49. Devils?" he said, his mind finding its train of thought as his hand found his cigarette lighter. "Devils are superstitions. Products of small minds and even smaller imaginations. There's one word that should be banned from the dictionary - devils. Ha! Now there's a flippant word.
Jason Mott
#50. At least Lester had the decency to weep at his act of perfidy. Reader, do you know what 'perfidy' means? I have a feeling you do, based on the scene that unfolded here. But you should look up the word in your dictionary, just to be sure.
Kate DiCamillo
#51. My lad chewed and swallowed a dictionary. We gave him Epsom salts - but we can't get a word out of him.
Les Dawson
#52. People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers-
a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry.
Anthony Liccione
#53. An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive. - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester
#54. I'm pretty sure that if you looked up the word "nuts" in the dictionary, you'll find my picture. Just another fun feature of my mutant-birdkid-freak package.
James Patterson
#55. The word hammockable (describing two trees that are the perfect distance apart between which a hammock can be hung) is not in the dictionary, but it should be. [Of lying in hammocks]
Dan Kieran
#56. Hey. Not sure what's going on-gonna go find out. Be careful and don't do anything stupid. Don't come after me-your better on your own. See you. F
I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the note.
Okay, so Fang had looked up vague in the dictionary and this was what it had said to write.
James Patterson
#57. The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.
Conan O'Brien
#58. Everyone knew Eleanor was the smartest person in their class. So when she said sabotage the rest of them went scrambling for the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Judy Blume
#59. I started by looking everything up in a Star Trek dictionary so I knew what I was talking about, but you can't do that because they talk in circles, and half of it doesn't make sense, so you'll just end up driving yourself more insane.
Jeri Ryan
#60. Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.
David Lodge
#61. [To beginning readers (ages 4 to 8) at a reading of "Noelle's Treasure Tale"]: If you discover a word in my book that you don't understand, ask your parents so they can look it up in the dictionary for you.
Gloria Estefan
#62. People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
Steven Pinker
#63. If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.
Erin McKean
#64. Except you're not on my side, are you Steve? Because if you were on my side you just would have handed me the dictionary like a grown-up. Because if you make a big fucking gesture of it Steve, then it becomes a big fucking deal.
Nathan Filer
#65. 'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting.
Victor LaValle
#66. Locavore" may have been the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year, but there's already been a word for those whose diets are restricted to seasonal items grown in their immediate area: That word is "peasant.
Brett Martin
#67. There is a breed of fashion models who weigh no more than an abridged dictionary.
Dave Barry
#68. Pal, if you ever look up the word right in a dictionary, you'll find it's one of the oldest words in the English language. Even so, people have never stopped arguing about what it means. I suspect they always will.
Avi
#69. The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
Carl Sandburg
#70. Perry: Look up "idiot" in the dictionary. You know what you'll find?
Harry: A picture of me?
Perry: No! The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!
Shane Black
#71. I read without a dictionary, understood some of each sentence, did not understand quite a bit of it, and was willing to read on ahead without understanding everything I had read.
John Freeman
#72. Abstraction, n.
Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.
David Levithan
#73. The Beatles did everything long before anyone else. They weren't afraid to try things and to experiment with a lot of sounds. In 200 years, when you look up 'rock and roll' in the dictionary, it'll have a picture of the Beatles next to it.
Joe Perry
#74. What you mean to me is something out of the ordinary, cause even a whole of a dictionary won't be able to describe it!
Andy Flynn
#75. Wake up to think of words ... want to walk through pages of meanings, the links in assonance, alliteration, or just simple sense that moves the eye to leap that way to the next-door play of sound and resonance.
Initially NO
#76. There's no limitation on comics, nothing. From a logical standpoint, how can there be a limitation on comics? You can use any word in the dictionary. You can put them in any order you want to. You can use a vast variety of illustrating styles. People could do all sorts of things.
Harvey Pekar
#77. Belittle, v.
No, I don't listen to the weather in the morning. No, I don't keep track of what I spend. No, it hadn't occurred to me that the Q train would have been much faster. But every time you give me that look, it doesn't make me want to live up to your standards.
David Levithan
#78. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#79. Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.
Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.
See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
Carl Sandburg
#80. Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled "words" two ways on the title page.
Bill Bryson
#81. I didn't like Dali: now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt . Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall after a bath.
Sachin Kundalkar
#82. That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen ... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because ... the sound of the rain needs no translation.
Alan Watts
#83. There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary. Lexicographers may be respected as authorities on word usage, but they are not the ultimate founts of wisdom.
Mortimer J. Adler
#84. In standard American English, the word with the most gradations of meaning is probably run. The Random House unabridged dictionary offers one hundred and seventy-eight options, beginning with "to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk" and ending with "melted or liquefied." In
Stephen King
#85. Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
Walt Whitman
#86. Do you know what 'Sputnik' means in Russian? 'Travelling companion'. I looked it up in a dictionary not long ago. Kind of a strange coincidence if you think about it. I wonder why the Russians gave their satellite that strange name. It's just a poor little lump of metal, spinning around the Earth.
Haruki Murakami
#87. [ ... ]Are both of you ... ?"
"Manscaped?" Dante smiled. "I'm fucking Italian; I been mowing my lawn since I was thirteen.
Damon Suede
#88. Love; n.; (luhv), The emotion of something unexplainable. A word so powerful, it's hard to find meaning in any dictionary. Just be glad you found it. (eg: The world shall love someday)
No One
#89. I always go with the dictionary definition of feminism, which is just social, political and economic equality for women.
Jessica Valenti
#90. There is no dictionary in the world that includes the words 'skinny' or 'fat' under the definitions of 'beautiful' and 'ugly'. So, focus on being healthy and stop the self-criticism.
Maddy Malhotra
#91. Asexuality, auditions, and Ashlinn. The world was giving me reason to worship the A section of my dictionary.
Calista Lynne
#92. I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#93. She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loved - a word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn't think of it. It wasn't in the dictionary either, not the one she wanted.
Olivia Sudjic
#94. Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man.
Honore De Balzac
#95. The word 'gratitude' is not part of the Hollywood dictionary.
Harry Cohn
#96. And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words ... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
Alan W. Watts
#97. Trinidad's language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it's the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.
Monique Roffey
#98. GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Chet Williamson
#99. To creative people, the compendium of the white man's dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#100. I am very sorry, but I cannot learn languages. I have tried hard, only to find that men of ordinary capacity can learn Sanskrit in less time that it takes me to buy a German Dictionary
George Bernard Shaw
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