Walter Ong Quotes & Sayings

We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed.40 "Writing and print and the computer," writes Walter Ong, "are all ways of technologizing the word" and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.41 But the world of the screen, as we're already coming to understand, is a very different place from the world of the page. A new intellectual ethic is taking hold. The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted. — Nicholas Carr

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world's most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something more like a private viewing of a stolen work of art. — Michael Lewis

CANDLE WISDOM
If you knew
what you will know
when your candle
has burnt low,
it would greatly
ease your plight
while your candle
still burns bright. — Piet Hein

There's no love as real as that of a girl and her best friend. — Catherine Doyle

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness. — Walter J. Ong

I am, at heart, a gentleman. — Marlene Dietrich

almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge. — Neil Postman

I just want people to focus on the performance. — Janet McTeer

Learners are doers, not recipients. — Walter J. Ong

Energy, like the biblical grain of the mustard-seed, will remove mountains. — Hosea Ballou

Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion. — Walter J. Ong

Publication there [in Nimbus] was to prove a turning point ... The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964) — Patrick Kavanagh

There is no way to write unless you read, and read a lot. — Walter J. Ong

Clarify your purpose. What is the why behind everything you do? When we know this in life or design it is very empowering and the path is clear. — Jack Canfield

For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous — Walter J. Ong