Top 100 Verb Quotes
#2. it's being branded a failure that causes the most pain; when 'failure' changes from being a verb to becoming a noun.
Anup Kochhar
#3. Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
Flann O'Brien
#4. If love is truly a verb, if help is a verb, if forgiveness is a verb, if kindness is a verb, then you can do something about it.
Betty Eadie
#5. I've heard it said: 'By his home you shall know him'; and we all know that we must pay attention to anyone who reverses the subject and auxiliary verb in his sentence.
Steven Brust
#6. Wonder is a verb. An activity, like walking or eating cheese. Despite what we may think we are all already philosophers; the question simply is whether we do it well or poorly.
Thomas Swanson
#7. Critical feedback shared in good faith is inherently a constructive dialogue. A "critique," a term that is both a noun and a verb, represents the systematical application of critical thought, a disciplined method of analysis, expressing of opinions, and rendering judgments.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#8. A person who uses party as a verb is a person who will walk into a shop and walk out wearing a rubber jumpsuit.
Cynthia Heimel
#9. Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.
Lynn Margulis
#10. Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.
Lorrie Moore
#11. Wisdom that is not acted upon is just philosophy ... but when lived as a verb, wisdom will be the foundation of your success.
Steve Maraboli
#12. The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .
Thomas Carlyle
#13. When people use your brand name as a verb, that is remarkable.
Meg Whitman
#14. I do so like all-encompassing words. Verb, adjective, noun. Yes, you are shitted.
Kim Harrison
#15. In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me, singular they, and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.
John McWhorter
#16. Let's start simple - what's your verb?" Carl asks. "What do you mean, my verb?" "A nurse nurses, teachers teach and preachers preach. If you could only choose one verb to describe what you do best, what is it?
Ian Bull
#17. Feminism is something you do. It's a verb. It's what you are. It's an activity; it's something you're actively engaged in.
Kathleen Hanna
#18. All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.
Joseph Devlin
#19. The verb that's been enforced on girls is to please. Girls are trained to please ... I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be educate, or activate, or engage, or confront, or defy, or create.
Eve Ensler
#20. Living is a verb, not a noun. Joy is found in living our life not just having a life.
Melissa Heisler
#21. I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.
Brian Eno
#22. I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
Richard Flanagan
#23. Prayer isn't just a noun, it's a verb too. It's an action. As long as you exercise your prayer muscles, you'll have the strength you need to do the deed.
April Erwin
#24. I succumbed. Late-fifteenth-century verb, Old French succomber or Latin succumbere, but a basic necessity of the human condition, especially mine.
David Mitchell
#25. A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.
Deborah Moggach
#26. There is no verb for compassion, but you have an adverb for compassion. That's interesting to me. You act compassionately. But then, how to act compassionately if you don't have compassion? That is where you fake. You fake it and make it. This is the mantra of the United States of America.
Dayananda Saraswati
#27. Faith is not just something you have. Faith is something you do. It can turn a noun into a verb quicker than you can say, See Spot run.
Beth Moore
#28. I wish I was the verb 'to trust' and never let you down ...
Eddie Vedder
#30. Evident in every small act of kindness, it was love as a verb. Love that made me feel more complete than I had ever felt in my glamorous, Jimmy Choo filled past.
Emily Giffin
#31. Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles.
Erin McKean
#32. The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second you.
Dashiell Hammett
#34. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.
Ulysses S. Grant
#35. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.
James Joyce
#37. It's "I felt bad," not "I felt badly," because "to feel badly" would mean "to grope about ineptly." The verb "felt" - definitely a verb of the senses, though not on Gordon's list - fuses the "bad" to the subject, rather than simply using an adverb to modify itself.
Mary Norris
#39. A sentence has a subject and a verb and expresses a complete thought. However,
Ann Longknife
#40. Jelly-bean is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular- - I am idling, I have idled, I will idle
F Scott Fitzgerald
#41. One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.
Edward Sapir
#42. Love is a verb. When it becomes a noun, it's over."
from "The God Patent" by Ransom Stephens
Ransom Stephens
#43. Both noun (eusebia) and verb (sebizo) derive from the Greek root seb-, which refers to the awe that radiates from gods to humans and is given back as worship. Everything related to this root has fear in it.
Sophocles
#44. In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be.
Franz Liszt
#45. What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry.
Oscar Wilde
#46. After the verb 'to Love', 'to Help' is the most beautiful verb in the world.
Bertha Von Suttner
#47. It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping - pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.
John Casey
#48. We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.
Erin McKean
#49. Whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
Mark Twain
#50. (Ibid. on using the verb to be in this culturally envenomed way, too, as in 'I'll Be There For You,' which has become the sort of empty spun-sugar shibboleth that communicates nothing except a certain unreflective sappiness in the speaker.
David Foster Wallace
#51. Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.
Jonathan Raban
#52. to give thanks is an action and rejoice is a verb and these are not mere pulsing emotions. While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things, because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.4
Ann Voskamp
#53. A similar sound, especially light, tremulous speech or laughter." This is it, he thought. "Agitation or excitement; flutter." A verb. Twitter.
Nick Bilton
#55. Green is a process, not a status. We need to think of 'green' as a verb, not an adjective.
Daniel Goleman
#56. Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.
Elena Ferrante
#59. :...I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb...
Bram Stoker
#60. Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.
John Dryden
#62. A player who conjugates a verb in the first person singular cannot be part of the squad, he has to conjugate the verb in the first person plural. We. We want to conquer. We are going to conquer. Using the word I when you're in a group makes things complicated.
Vanderlei Luxemburgo
#63. My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.
Jorge Luis Borges
#64. Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.
C.J. Cherryh
#65. In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy.
Steve Maraboli
#66. When we were little kids, 'friend' wasn't a verb. You didn't 'friend' someone. You had friends. It was only a noun. It didn't multitask. It was a simpler time, Hen.
Daniel Ehrenhaft
#67. As a rule of thumb, if a verb or phrase is about wishes, emotions, doubt, denial, recommendations, knowledge and understanding, then there's a strong possibility the Subjunctive will follow.
Linda Plummer
#68. And by knowing what we fear, don't we know what we care about, how we are measuring our worth, what success looks like? I asked. So isn't fear helpful, then?
Patti Digh
#69. It will be seen that the Infinitive is a kind of noun with certain features of the verb, especially that of taking an object (when the verb is Transitive) and adverbial qualifiers. In short, the Infinitive is a Verb-Noun.
H. Martin
#70. I'm going to give you a sentence, a full sentence with a noun and a verb and a possible agitate. I don't like all these judges running around with their half baked sentences, thats how you get salmonella poisoning.
Michael Buckley
#71. Give a man a proverb
and he'll muse for a moment.
Teach a man to find the verb in every proverb
and he'll walk in wisdom for a lifetime.
Cameron Semmens
#72. I learned that saying you love your friends isn't enough: that love is a verb - it requires Acts of Love. It is all about the doing, not the saying, and now I make a point, every day, of emailing or phoning or making a plan with those I love.
Jane Green
#73. Is there a God? No. God is a verb, not a noun.
Micky Dolenz
#74. But the objection being raised was not due to the phrase's overall lack of verve; rather it was due to the word facilitate. Specifically, the verb had been accused of being so tepid and prim that it failed to do justice to the labors of the men in the room.
Amor Towles
#75. A sentence can offer a moment of quiet, it can crackle with energy or it can just lie there, listless and uninteresting. What makes the difference? The verb.
Constance Hale
#76. If the noun is good and the verb is strong, you almost never need an adjective.
J. Anthony Lukas
#77. There is a real danger when caring begins to lose its emotional dimension and becomes nothing but a verb.
Joyce Rachelle
#78. Was. What does was actually mean? The verb to be. Past tense of is. Does it mean that someone is no longer being?
Melina Marchetta
#80. Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action - all action, past and future - comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
#81. When people say "to father," they generally mean that one biological act - the act of begetting a child. It is different with the verb "to mother." "To mother" implies care. A man's act of fathering can easily be that one seed sown; a woman's act of mothering can take up all the rest of her life. I
Deborah Meyler
#82. Possess. Have. Hold. Enjoy. Control. Dominate. Pick your verb, Ms. Fairchild. I intend to explore so very many of them.
J. Kenner
#83. Why indeed must 'God' be a noun? Why not a verb - the most active and dynamic of all.
Mary Daly
#84. Squee." 1 (verb): To emit an onomatopoetic girlish swooning sound out of pure fanboy adulation. 2 (noun): the sound itself.
Neil Patrick Harris
#85. I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.
Richard Ford
#86. In that light, philosophy is not so much
or not simply
'the love of wisdom,' but instead marks the passage from wonder as a noun to wonder as a verb. Philosophy is the love of wisdom to the extent that it remains an incitement to it.
Michael Munro
#87. Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb. What might Beunas Yerbas be, I wonder?'
'A string of adjectives and conjunctions?'
'Or an expletive?
David Mitchell
#89. verb swon to swear, derivative of swannee I swan, raising kids is like being pecked to death by a chicken
Amy Metz
#90. The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
#91. If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after!
Bill Gaede
#92. Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?" asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. "American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.
Oscar Wilde
#93. Mother is not a title. Mother is a verb. It is not who you are. It's what you do.
Shonda Rhimes
#94. Love is a verb. It is an action word.
Unknown
#95. The greatest relationships are those in which love is not treated as a noun, but as a verb; with romance not viewed as a burden, but lived as a poem.
Steve Maraboli
#96. Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.
Mary Oliver
#97. Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
Michael Shermer
#99. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.
Elmore Leonard
#100. Parenting isn't a noun but a verb
an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.
Jodi Picoult
