Slavish Language Quotes & Sayings

[Pliny the Elder] used to say that no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it. — Pliny The Younger

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have meetings with our record label to tell them how to market us. — Adam Jones

Life is not meant to be easy. But it can be simple. — Tony Curl

...there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. — Robert Pirsig

When my syndicated show got canceled, the next day I still knew how to write jokes. That was a huge revelation. Because at first you think, "I won't have any shelter! What am I gonna do? The sun is hot. Very thirsty." — Jon Stewart

I think you might very well be the most eccentric person I've ever met. — Jandy Nelson

Three years in jail is a good corrective for three years at Harvard. — Alger Hiss

You can have all the titles in the world but if you cannot treat others as you would yourself, you have no love to give! — Kemi Sogunle

The superior man is slow in his words and earnest in his conduct. — Confucius

Jesus died for our sins," Noah says solemnly.
"What?!?" I reply, choking back my thoughts.
"I was just seeing if you were listening. — David Levithan

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints
the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk
we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents. — Harry Mathews

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing — Doris Lessing

[On Chopin's Preludes:]
His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power. — George Sand