Vocabulary Quotes

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

Lethargy. It's a word I know, because it's in one of my father's favorite expressions. Lethargy breeds lethargy. It means the more you lie around doing nothing, the more you want to lie around doing nothing. Your limbs and your mind feel so heavy that it becomes a major effort just to lift your arm to channel surf.

Neal Shusterman

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist.

Eleanor Roosevelt

We’re sick of hearing people say, “That band is so gay,” or “Those guys are fags.” Gay is not a synonym for shitty. If you wanna say something’s shitty, say it’s shitty. Stop being such homophobic assholes.

Pete Wentz

She took a moment to lament her lack of parasol. Every time she left the house, she felt keenly the absence of her heretofore ubiquitous accessory.

Gail Carriger

This year my goal will be to learn new vocabulary in English and to read as much as possible books.

Deyth Banger

Norman Mailer enhances the beauty of pugilism by elegantly exploring it.

Davis Miller

He shook his head,'Fuck, you say such fucking weird things.''Is that still your favourite word?' asked Isola interestedly, 'I like "verisimilitude". Tolkein said the most beautiful English phrase is "cellar door",

Allyse Near

If I had been born in the 1700′s, presumably children had a bigger vocabulary than I had which means I wouldn’t have been able to recite fairy tales to kids because I’m not smart enough.You know…?I’d have to be like…..uh:In time passed, though not long ago, there lived three pigs in stature, little in number, three, who being of an age both entitled and inspired to seek their fortune did set about to do thusly.When they had traveled a distance, pig numbered first spake saying, “Harken Brethren, head this impetuous realm! Tarry me far from hearth and home I fear we shall fair *snort* not well!” And so being collectively agreed, but individually impaled, the diminutive swine sought each to erect himself an abode.....

John Branyan

In God’s vocabulary, ‘lost’ is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective ‘found’ if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

He was telling an interesting anecdote full of exciting words like "encyclopedia" and "rhododendron".

A.A. Milne

Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Right!""Right!""You can get there!""I can get there!""You're a natural at counting to two!""I'm a nat'ral at counting to two!""If you can count to two, you can count to anything!""If I can count to two, I can count to anything!""And then the world is your mollusc!""My mollusc! What's a mollusc?

Terry Pratchett

Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.

Ron Suskind

When Internet parlance finds its way into our accepted vocabulary, it becomes a cliché.

Paul Babicki

So much of what we read and write these days is disposable.

John Kasich

All conversation, big or small, is about painting word pictures of your experiences for other people. The more

Nicholas Boothman

PLEASE and THANK YOU...two polite phrases which are slowly disappearing from our vocabulary.

Anthony T.Hincks

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.

Rebecca Goldstein

There are two words that I believe could be completely eradicated from our vocabulary – “I can’t.” These two words are so definite that they leave absolutely no room for hope. Instead, I suggest we use the phrase, “How can I?

Daniel Willey

Lincoln bought a German language newspaper.

Harold Holzer

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.

Anis Mojgani

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

Joseph Brodsky

Most adults have a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, meaning that children must learn 10 to 20 words a day between the ages of eight months and 18 years. And yet the most frequent 100 words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4000 words account for 98% of conversation.

David Miller

The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.

T. Geronimo Johnson

We live at the level of our language.

Ellen Gilchrist

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.

José Saramago

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing.

Diane Ackerman

As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!

Sheri S. Tepper

There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.

Chris Gardner

Stephen King is a powerful guy, will powerful vocabulary.

Deyth Banger

The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.

Stephen King

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

Milan Kundera

With my sometimes blunt indecent vocabulary & very vivid imagination, I wonder if I should be writing "other" kinds of content.

April Mae Monterrosa

The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?

Stephen King

Mr. Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldn’t find the apposite word, if you found your language slipping into the mire of vagueness and obscurity, this meant that you needed to work on your vocabulary. Because the apposite word certainly existed – and it was very eager to make your acquaintance.

Gavin Extence

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I like to quote Shakespeare. But in this case, the rapper Eminem said it best: Words are a motherfucker.

Jillian Keenan

I collect words--they are sweets in the mouth of sound.

Sally Gardner

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

Alberto Manguel

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

Ari Marmell

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

John Dewey

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

A.S. Byatt

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

Henry Hazlitt

She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

Carl Sagan

I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.

Woody Allen

In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana.

Madeleine L'Engle

I understand the gist of your speculation,' said Rhialto. 'It is most likely nuncupatory.

Jack Vance

This document outlines our plan to perpetrate insurance fraud, insider trading, and character assassination....hopefully tripling our paycheck on this job.Okay, see? Those words I understand just fine. Use them more often.-Lieutenant Massey Reynstein & Captain Tagon

Howard Tayler

Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

Catherynne M. Valente

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

Roy Peter Clark

A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

J.R.R. Tolkien

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up.For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

Charles Harrington Elster

He uses the nice old words so rich in tradition to be sure I know he means it.

Frank Herbert

OK, so the guy is cool, but... I mean own up, this is barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical mass, this is... this is... total vocabulary failure!

Douglas Adams

How many words are you having trouble with, sir?""Just the ones that I've highlighted.""I count at least a dozen, and I haven't gotten out of the first paragraph.""That's as far as I got, too. I'm not sure you and I speak the same language.

Howard Tayler

Spy' is such a short ugly word. I prefer 'espionage.' Those extra three syllables really say something.

Howard Tayler

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

Philip Zaleski

1 2 Next

Vocabulary Quotes

Related Topics