Edsger Dijkstra Quotes

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

Edsger Dijkstra

• Language
• Impossible
• Try

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Quotes to Explore

• To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.

  

  Octavio Paz
  • Great
  • Language
  • Limits

• Nashville is the place where I first realized how impossible it is to look at someone and know what is inside them, what special something they possess.

  

  Callie Khouri
  • Know
  • Look
  • Impossible

• When you first hear Mozart's music, your first impression is that it's very alive, but if you peel away the layers, you can hear sorrow and sadness behind it, and that's what I try to be: multi-layered.

  

  Park Chan-wook
  • Music
  • Try
  • Sadness

• The Palestinian Rifle is ready and we will aim it if they try to prevent us from praying in Jerusalem.

  

  Yasser Arafat
  • Try
  • Aim
  • Jerusalem

• Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.

  

  Orhan Pamuk
  • Way
  • Language
  • Feel

• I try to have a normal life since I have an abnormal job.

  

  D. B. Sweeney
  • Life
  • Job
  • Try

• Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

  

  Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Good
  • Person
  • Impossible

• Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

  

  Salvador Dali
  • Try
  • Classic
  • Museums

• Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone.

  

  F. Murray Abraham
  • Trying
  • Man
  • English

• I am an emotional and fragile person. I observe life, I am perceptive and can read a person's body language. I have a strong journalistic streak in me, and had I not been a filmmaker, I would have become a film journalist. I have combined my perceptive and journalistic traits to create my own brand of cinema.

  

  Madhur Bhandarkar
  • Life
  • Strong
  • Language

• I have to think of moderation, which is not a word that's in my vocabulary. But I try.

  

  Pamela Anderson
  • Think
  • Try
  • Moderation

• It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

  

  Lafcadio Hearn
  • Work
  • English
  • Language

• You don't dream about things that are impossible; that are out of your range.

  

  Olga Kurylenko
  • Dream
  • You
  • Impossible

• I think legally we have to do 'fun' with a period. I think we agreed because apparently there was another band called 'fun.' We Google-searched, which now makes sense because we're so impossible to Google-search.

  

  Nate Ruess Fun.
  • Fun
  • Think
  • Band

• To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.

  

  Florence King
  • Good
  • Language
  • Achieve

• We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.

  

  P. J. O'Rourke
  • Country
  • Learn
  • Model

• Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

  

  Dale Carnegie
  • Best
  • Purpose
  • Picture

• I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I'm conscious of the mainstream without selling out.

  

  J. Cole
  • Know
  • Attention
  • Care

• She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power...I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.

  

  Haruki Murakami
  • Moving
  • Language
  • Emotions

• I know my dad always wanted to heal the world, and so I think it would be great to follow in his footsteps.

  

  Paris Jackson
  • World
  • Great
  • Know

• If the Jews are denied the right to live in freedom and peace, soon we will all be denied this right. If the light of Israel is extinguished, we will all face darkness. If Israel falls, the West falls.

  

  Geert Wilders
  • Mind
  • Fall
  • Darkness

• There must be in prudence also some master virtue.

  

  Aristotle
  • Virtue
  • Master
  • Prudence

• About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

  

  Edsger Dijkstra
  • Language
  • Impossible
  • Try