31 quotes found
“Tears are words the heart can't express”
“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”
“Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.”
“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”
“Wit is educated insolence.”
“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”
“Hypocrite: The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.”
“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we ...”
“Consensus: The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very iss...”
“An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.”
“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; ...”
“She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loveda word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn't think of it. It wasn't in th...”
“Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained.”
“Though words are arbitrary in their primitive institution, yet when once their signification is fixed, we are no more entitled to alter it than to call a tree an elephant; for, being no man's priva...”
“Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
“If you cant define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability...”
“Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the extermination of other animals and his own spe...”
“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
“I'm going to use them to track him down and thwart him." "Thwart?" Sarissa asked."Thwart." I said. "To prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his...”
