Slovenliness Quotes & Sayings

Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children - not to mention our president - cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was at least half serious in his "Laments for a dying language":

Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage.
Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage. — Charles Yang

But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive. — Jessica Valenti

Accuracy first," I used to tell the writers. "We must never lie by accident, or through slovenliness, only deliberately! — Sefton Delmer

Propriety was a rigid master, but one that must be obeyed if one wanted to keep a sterling reputation. — Lawana Blackwell

Naps are not a sign of physical slovenliness. They are a sign that I am listening to my body. It will reward me with stable emotions, hormones that stay in check, social finesse, continued cleverness, and the ability to write prose that does not make me gag. — Thomm Quackenbush

I have never painted as well as I thought I should, so frustration came early ... — Thomas S. Buechner

An Olympic medal is the greatest achievement and honor that can be received by an athlete. I would swap any World Title to have won gold at the Olympics. — Jeff Fenech

Slovenliness is a lazy and beastly negligence of a man's own person, whereby he becomes so sordid as to be offensive to those about him. — Theophrastus

there is a field. — Khaled Hosseini

I usually dive head first and am really excited about that changes. — Glen Mazzara

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed. — Alfred Brendel

Slowly, and in spite of anything we Americans do or do not do, it looks a little as if you and some other good people are going to have to answer the old question of whether you want to keep your country unshackled by taking even more definite steps to do so — Franklin D. Roosevelt

An effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. — George Orwell

You shoulda known the entirety of the trap, a**hole,
love means eventual pain
victory means eventual defeat
grace means eventual slovenliness,
there's no way
out ... you see, you
understand? — Charles Bukowski

Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. — Martin Luther

Friends, there are many areas in which I need encouragement, but worrying is not one of them. I worry the way Renee Fleming sings high Cs: Effortlessly. Loudly. At length. — Martha Beck

The Hindus have a peculiar slovenliness in business matters, not being sufficiently methodical and strict in keeping accounts etc. — Swami Vivekananda

What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal
for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental
life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew
only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as 'natural' as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn't stone sinners for the same reason they didn't commit suicide
it was beneath them. — Toni Morrison

An armed man need not fight. — Robert A. Heinlein

He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else. Another will be forgiven much, but to him it will not be forgiven. A man who leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes. For on everyday clothes the spots do not show. — Nikolai Gogol

Look at that battle you are involved in; you are caught in it: you are it. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The avoidance of little evils, little sins, little inconsistencies, little weaknesses, little follies, little indiscretions and imprudences, little foibles, little indulgences of self and of the flesh, little acts of indolence or indecision, or slovenliness or cowardice, little equivocations or aberrations from high integrity, little touches of shabbiness or meanness ... little indifferences to the feelings or wishes of others, little outbreaks of temper, or crossness, or selfishness, or vanity - the avoidance of such little things as these goes far to make up at least the negative beauty of a holy life. — Horatius Bonar

The stupidity of the American voter is exceeded only by its slovenliness. — Jonathan Gruber

Seymour once said to me - in a crosstown bus, of all places - that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold. — J.D. Salinger

I think I was always interested in animals. If a man likes a woman, you know, he might discuss business, but there's a part of his brain that is looking at the girl coming in and checking the girls. I do the same with animals. — Isabella Rossellini

There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up to the 'ancestral law'. What we fought against was the slovenliness in applying Mendel's categories and asserting that such formulae apply in cases when they did not. — Karl Pearson

Decide to live your life by faith. You can't see the air you breath but you never doubt it's existence. — Timothy Pina