Dictionary Quotes

• Then idiots talk....of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce!....But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I'll show you energy.

  

  Charles Dickens
  • Opportunity
  • Energy
  • Idiots

• Hair, to Tillie, meant nothing by way of being a woman's crowning glory. It was merely, as the dictionary so ably states, small horny, fibrous tubes with bulbous roots, growing out of the skins of mammals; and it was meant to be combed down as flat as possible and held in place with countless wire hairpins.

  

  Bess Streeter Aldrich
  • Glory
  • Skins
  • Dictionary

• Knowledge above the average can be crammed into the average man, but it remains dead, and in the last analysis sterile knowledge. The result is a man who may be a living dictionary but nevertheless falls down miserably in all special situations and decisive moments in life.

  

  Adolf Hitler
  • Life
  • Knowledge
  • Result

• The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory.

  

  Edwin Conklin
  • Probability
  • Printing
  • Explosion

• You will be surprised to learn how some very knowing people have misunderstood Plotto. On glancing at it, some of the intelligentia have jumped at the false conclusion, that Plotto is a dictionary of situations, a mechanism that yields a cut and dried plot by the mere use of a thumb index. Plotto, to the contrary, merely suggests the situations for the plot, explains what is to be done through Purpose and Obstacle and even offers suggestions as to the way in which it should be done.

  

  William Wallace Cook
  • People
  • Purpose
  • Cutting

• The word hammockable (describing two trees that are the perfect distance apart between which a hammock can be hung) is not in the dictionary, but it should be. [Of lying in hammocks]

  

  Dan Kieran
  • Should
  • Word
  • Hammockable

• The trouble with the dictionary is that you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up to see how it is spelled.

  

  Will Cuppy
  • Look
  • Trouble
  • Word

• If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

  

  Steven Wright
  • Know
  • Word
  • Dictionary

• If you would look up bad labor relations in the dictionary, you would have an American Airlines logo beside it.

  

  Elton Joe Kendall
  • Relations
  • Dictionary
  • American Airlines

• Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.

  

  Henry Rollins Black Flag
  • Poet
  • Prove
  • Communicate

• I'm going to be so normal that when people look up normal in the dictionary, my name will be there.

  

  Wendy Mass
  • People
  • Names
  • Normal

• My dictionary has no such expression as a violent fight.

  

  Mahatma Gandhi
  • Fight
  • Expression
  • Dictionary

• Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.

  

  David Bowie
  • Intellectual
  • Critics
  • Dictionary

• Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

  

  Eugene Delacroix
  • Nature
  • Words
  • Dictionary

• Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word "impossible" is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.

  

  Jules Verne
  • American
  • French
  • Arise

• Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?

  

  Russell M. Nelson
  • Dictionary
  • Printing

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