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"We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them."
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"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."
"Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape."
"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."
"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."
"Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?"
"He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out."
"Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty."
"Kitai blinked slowly. "Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous.""We have a lot of words like that," Tavi said. "They can mean more than one thing.""That is stupid," Kitai said. "It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing."
Explore more quotes by Samuel Butler
"A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it."
"Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since."
"What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth."
"When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence."
"The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it."
"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself."
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