Panini Quotes & Sayings

The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini. — Swami Vivekananda

I consider myself a kind of a nerd, because when we go to the coffee shop in the mornings, we sit there in a very neat row with our laptops. It's just like being at work, but with coffee and panini. And, of course, you don't get paid. — Christopher Fowler

Museums are obliged to denature and make dreary the impulse which led to an object's original creation. Serried rows of coins are like Panini football stickers in a more ponderous form. But as objects to be handled they tell an extraordinary story, from the most over-the-top gold monster to a clipped, almost featureless little square of rough metal used as emergency currency in the Siege of Vienna. — Simon Winder

I moan with pleasure.
"Did you just have a foodgasm?" he asks, wiping ricotta from his lips.
"Where have you been all my life?" I ask the beautiful panini. — Stephanie Perkins

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! — Steven Pinker