Peinumenchu > Peinumenchu's Quotes

“Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.”
― Coco Chanel, Believing in Ourselves: The Wisdom of Women

“You know, sometimes kids get bad grades in school because the class moves too slow for them. Einstein got D's in school. Well guess what, I get F's!!!”
― Bill Watterson

“Don't judge without having heard both sides. Even persons who think themselves virtuous very easily forget this elementary rule of prudence.”
― Josemaría Escrivá, The Way of The Cross

“Put your heart aside. Duty comes first. But when fulfilling your duty, put your heart into it. It helps.”
― St. Josemaria Escriva'

“You were very hurt at being slighted. That means you are forgetting too easily who you are.”
― St. Josemaria Escriva

“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”
― Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires

“What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess

“Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches

“We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
― Gore Vidal

“There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.”
― Stephen Fry

“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field.”
― St. John of the Cross, The Poems of St. John of the Cross

“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, Thinking as a Science

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets —no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!”
― Philip Roth

“Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Education doesn't make you smarter.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
― G.K. Chesterton