A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.
Related Quotes
Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word.
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.
What is revolutionary today is that we're using precision-guided munitions. And instead of building individual weapons, we are building an industry and a philosophy, the culture of precision. You saw Desert Storm. Precision works.
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally.
Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.
One of the principal obstacles to the rapid diffusion of a new idea lies in the difficulty of finding suitable expression to convey its essential point to other minds. Words may have to be strained into a new sense, and scientific controversies constantly resolve themselves into differences about the meaning of words. On the other hand, a happy nomenclature has sometimes been more powerful than rigorous logic in allowing a new train of thought to be quickly and generally accepted.
What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,--for there must be subordination,--but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare.
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
I have to admit that I'm not very good with grammar. They taught grammar in elementary and high school, but I went to public schools, so I never really learned it.
I had very bad temper tantrums. I was in more grammar schools than there are years of grammar school. I got kicked out of, like, two preschools, a kindergarten.
The public is wiser than the wisest critic.
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.
[The American public demands] a sense of legitimacy from and in the presidency. There is more to this than dignity, more than propriety. The president is expected to personify our betterness in an inspiring way, to express in what he does and is, not just what he says, a moral idealism which, in much of the public mind, is the very opposite of politics.
Teachers, who are really good create that environment where you can be very satisfied by the process of learning. If you do something and you find it a very satisfying experience then you want to do more of it. The great teachers somehow convey in their very attitude and their words and their actions and everything they do that this is an important thing you're learning. You end up wanting to do more of it and more of it and more of it. That's a real talent some people have to convey the importance of that and to reflect it back to the students.
Cleanliness is a state of purity, clarity, and precision
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