Top 100 Quotes About Vocabulary
#2. The worst part of it is you don't know if he's barking at an owl, the moon or a burglar!"
"That's one of the drawbacks of a limited vocabulary!
Charles M. Schulz
#4. Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.
Samuel Johnson
#5. White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.
Joni Mitchell
#6. What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?
Charles Frazier
#7. 'Give up ... it's time to quit,' I don't think I've ever really accepted those kinds of words in my life or vocabulary.
Willie Aames
#8. Her heart was pounding hard, not with excitement but with fear. The head could tell the heart all that was eighteen years over, but in matters of emotion the heart had its own brilliant vocabulary.
Stephen King
#9. We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.
Steven Pinker
#10. With my sometimes blunt indecent vocabulary & very vivid imagination, I wonder if I should be writing "other" kinds of content.
April Mae Monterrosa
#11. For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.
Ambrose Bierce
#12. I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underpriviledged was overused, I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime, but I have a great vocabulary.
Jules Feiffer
#13. There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts ... it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.
David Coleman
#14. People shout when they don't have the vocabulary to whisper), but
Maggie Stiefvater
#15. I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children.
Sam Lipsyte
#16. Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A.S. Byatt
#17. I also say "Boy" a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and some times I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair.
J.D. Salinger
#18. It's very hard to get pretentious about beer. You can become knowledgeable and start to talk with a highfalutin' vocabulary. But you can only go so far with beer, and I've always liked that.
Fritz Maytag
#19. The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
Milan Kundera
#20. To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation.
Yves Klein
#21. The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
Clive James
#22. A German psychologist says that women talk more than men because they have a bigger vocabulary. But, it evens out because men only listen half the time.
Jay Leno
#23. Words can't describe... shouldn't be in a writer's vocabulary.
Mary M. Forbes
#24. Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head - by reading.
Jim Trelease
#25. To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge.
John Stuart Mill
#26. So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.
Edward Sapir
#27. In my own case, I'm an artist, and I'm really interested in expanding the vocabulary of human action, and basically empowering people through interactivity. I want people to discover themselves as actors, as creative actors, by having interactive experiences.
Golan Levin
#28. the moment he'd seen that female he'd forgotten his own name, most of his English vocabulary, and seventy-five percent of his sense of balance.
Instant. Cosmic. Attraction.
-Trez's thoughts about Selena
J.R. Ward
#29. I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
Tom Waits
#30. Beyond that, I learned about visual adaptation - what a picture can say, and what it can't. A picture's worth a thousand words, but its vocabulary is limited. A picture's no sesquipedalian.
Brent Weeks
#31. Practice the vocabulary of love - unlearn the language of hate and contempt.
Sathya Sai Baba
#32. I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind. I was a danger to myself and others.
Anthony Bourdain
#33. Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.
Juan Pablo Galavis
#34. Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress ...
Blaise Cendrars
#35. In his head, his mother said, 'People shout when they don't have the vocabulary to whisper'.
Maggie Stiefvater
#36. I'm Howard Stern with a vocabulary. I'm the man he wishes he could be.
Don Imus
#37. You see failed vocabulary in the adult world so often, and it's often because once you reach a certain age you're kind of embarrassed to go look up a word if you don't know what it means.
Daniel Handler
#38. You must take responsibility for removing I can't from your vocabulary.
Jack Canfield
#39. His captivating speech came not from his grammar or vocabulary but from the joy he took in wielding them well.
Robert Lane Greene
#40. Rather than being nonverbal, individuals with NLD generally present with abundant verbal ability, with many showing precocious language development and
high levels of vocabulary and general knowledge.
Maggie Mamen
#41. The words hot, lot, and got were not apart of a ladies vocabulary.
Rhys Bowen
#42. He's a moody creature,isn't he?" she said to the bird. Auntie Em gave one impatient squawk, the extent of her vocabulary.
"Sounds like she got up on the wrong side of the perch," Alan commented.
"Oh,no.She's in a good mood if she says anything.
Nora Roberts
#43. I'm always fighting with profanity and Christian comedy. I'm telling you, it's always a fight. Because my father said to me, he said, 'Well, Kym, I feel like comics and people that use profanity, you have a lack of vocabulary, actually, a whole lot.'
Kym Whitley
#44. The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
Marilyn Hacker
#45. Vocabulary words are the building blocks of the internal learning structure. Vocabulary is also the tool to better define a problem, seek more accurate solutions, etc.
Ruby K. Payne
#46. I don't swear much; I've taken those words out of my vocabulary, and having kids, you have to have two sets of language!
Keith Urban
#47. Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#48. By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.
Ben Carson
#49. I was probably just trying to be Dennis Miller, but without the vocabulary to actually be Dennis Miller. I guess I was just less interesting than I am now, if I am interesting at all.
Todd Barry
#50. Dad!' I'd complain when I lost track of what he was saying. 'Speak English.'
'Megyn, I will not lower my vocabulary to meet yours,' he said. 'You must raise yours to meet mine.
Megyn Kelly
#51. At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.
Dante Alighieri
#52. With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.
Lytton Strachey
#53. Turkish." Vocabulary was deleted, new words added. Place-names all over the country were Turkified (for example, "Smyrna" became "Izmir"), which only added confusion and another obfuscating layer to the buildup of historical sediment.
Eric Bogosian
#54. The march of civilisation has given the modern girl a vocabulary and an ability to use it which her grandmother never had
P.G. Wodehouse
#55. If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?
Alan Alda
#56. I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary.
David Longstreth
#57. Satan] invades the Sunday school, the Bible class, and even the pulpit. He even invades the church under cover of an orthodox vocabulary, emptying sacred terms of their biblical sense.
Billy Graham
#58. Sound is the one true vocabulary of nature
and not the peacock-palette painters swear
he uses for his best stuff, for his daily disposable frescoes ["Sound," Poetry, September 2015].
Billy Ramsell
#60. I was attracted to Robert's work because his visual vocabulary was akin to my poetic one, even if we seemed to be moving toward different destinations. Robert always would tell me, "Nothing is finished until you see it.
Patti Smith
#61. I've learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.
Annie Leibovitz
#62. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
King Samuel Benson
#63. There is a need for promoting women's sexual agency in today's society, because if it wasn't an issue, terms such as 'female sexual empowerment' would be made redundant. The fact that we merely have this vocabulary is indicative of that.
Miya Yamanouchi
#64. Greeley knew no language but his, but of that, he possessed a most extraordinary mastery. An employee
Harold Holzer
#65. The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.
David Ogilvy
#66. What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.
Joseph Brodsky
#67. I have learned to avoid this. The goal is to communicate, not to impress readers with your vocabulary.
Michael Hyatt
#68. When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life ... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.
Walter Dean Myers
#69. The vocabulary I use has to reflect the people I'm trying to communicate with.
Damian Loeb
#70. I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.
Andy Serkis
#71. We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer ... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.
Steve Jobs
#72. Threats are the last resort of a man with no vocabulary.
Tamora Pierce
#73. Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.
Diane Ackerman
#74. When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.
Marilynne Robinson
#75. Milton's learned vocabulary [ ... ] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents' speech as heard by the child.
John Broadbent
#76. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word postmodernist.
Donna Tartt
#77. The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.
Jamie Dimon
#79. You've traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood.
Maria Semple
#80. I have no fear, no fear at all. I wake up, and I have no fear. I go to bed without fear. Fear, fear, fear, fear. Yes, 'fear' is a word that is not in my vocabulary.
Steve Martin
#81. There is no universal language in the jungles; each species has its own language, and though the vocabulary of some is limited, as in the case of porcupines and vultures, the language of each species is understood by all the jungle-folk.
Jim Corbett
#82. First, we have to find a common vocabulary for energy security. This notion has a radically different meaning for different people. For Americans it is a geopolitical question. For the Europeans right now it is very much focused on the dependence on imported natural gas.
Daniel Yergin
#83. A picture is worth 1,000 megapixels. High-definition (HD) TV images are used to camouflage some writers' low-definition (LD) vocabulary.
John R. Dallas Jr.
#84. the philanthropic banker his brother-in-law, who predominated so much in the town that some called him a Methodist, others a hypocrite, according to the resources of their vocabulary;
George Eliot
#85. My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.
Charles Frazier
#86. It is our duty and our joy to communicate our hearts to each other. Words assist us in this task.
Kate DiCamillo
#88. There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.
Henry Miller
#89. Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive.
Jennifer Senior
#90. In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.
Mary Wesley
#91. Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities ... Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist's statements.
Robert Genn
#92. They aren't skanks and they aren't stupid. I prefer to call them 'scantily-clad ladies with limited vocabulary.
Tara Sivec
#93. The mistakes were made by people who did not know how to wield the concepts University, division and team-spirit. Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary.
Anonymous
#94. Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary.
Beck
#95. Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident
John Berger
#96. Neighbor is no longer confined to the vocabulary of the individual. It is a national word. Modern inventions have annihilated distance. Commercial relations have broken down barriers of race and religion, and the family of nations is a recognized fact.
David Josiah Brewer
#97. Foul language will earn you a recitation that will grow your vocabulary.
Rachel A. Marks
#98. As you can appreciate over my lifetime I've developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box.
Adrian Belew
#99. From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.
Ian Hacking
#100. A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.
Frank Herbert
