75 Dictionary Quotes

Following is our list of dictionary quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about 1984 newspeak dictionary.

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Famous Dictionary Quotes

What's another word for Thesaurus? - Steven Wright

What's another word for Thesaurus? — Steven Wright

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words. — Samuel Johnson

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. — Baltasar Gracian

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word. — Julio Cortazar

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. - Steven Wright

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. — Steven Wright

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of. - Burt Bacharach

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of. — Burt Bacharach

Wait, Wikipedia isn't working? Why hasn't someone invented a paper version of it? A set of books organized alphabetically by topic? — Ben Shapiro

You'll find sympathy in the dictionary between sh*t and suicide. - Roddy Piper

You'll find sympathy in the dictionary between sh*t and suicide. — Roddy Piper

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book. — Jamaica Kincaid

There are about 30 words around you all the time, like 'thread' or 'exit.' — Jean-Michel Basquiat

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. - Kahlil Gibran

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. — Kahlil Gibran

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. — Booker T. Washington

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. — Charles Baudelaire

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. — Henry Ward Beecher

Short Dictionary Quotes

  • The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. — Vince Lombardi
  • Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools. — Napoleon Bonaparte
  • He’s for real. If you look up the definition of patriotism in the dictionary, his picture is there. — Bill Miller
  • Talking with Jordan Peterson is like getting beat with a f*cking dictionary. — Theo Von
  • Impossible is the word for fools in my dictionary. — Rakesh Jhunjhunwala
  • Are there any more beautiful words in the English dictionary than 'see you tomorrow? — Jennifer Flackett
  • I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it. — Steven Wright
  • If you look up the definition of greatness in the dictionary, it will say Michael Jordan. — Elgin Baylor
  • Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature. — Martin H. Fischer
  • Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Dictionary Image Quotes

Dictionary quote Impossible is a word to be found only in dictionary of fools.
Impossible is a word to be found only in dictionary of fools.

Oxford Dictionary Quotes

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything. — David Bowie

In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots. — Neal Stephenson

Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary? — Terry Jones

On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's. — William Safire

The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language. — Conan O'Brien

People Writing About Dictionary

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Steven Wright

Steven Wright
quotes on life, work

543 9203
Read quotes by Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte
quotes on leadership, success and war

871 13074
Read quotes by Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson
quotes on writing, life and love

1736 7561
Read quotes by Baltasar Gracian

Baltasar Gracian
quotes on life, love and worldly wisdom

261 1642
Read quotes by Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar

55 1254
Read quotes by Burt Bacharach

Burt Bacharach
quotes on life, love and music

15 101

More Dictionary Quotes

My work is play. And I play when I design. I even looked it up in the dictionary, to make sure that I actually do that, and the definition of “play,” number one, was “engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor,” and number two was “gambling.” And I realize I do both when I’m designing. — Paula Scher

Weird itself, even in the dictionary, is just something that is different and unexplainable. A weirdo is someone who follows their heart. Im definitely weird, aint nothing wrong with that. — Kid Cudi

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously. — Julio Cortazar

Me? Well, I don't know, I must go to a dictionary and learn what a crook is. I've never been a crook. — Jacob Zuma

Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness.It means profusion of religions. — Shashi Tharoor

A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word "hermeneutics" in the dictionary. — Steven Weinberg

Speaking fluent English - like doing long division or successfully rewiring a 220-volt electrical outlet - is not a skill you're born with. It's something you learn, occasionally even by opening some old dictionary. — Tucker Carlson

Don't try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being. — Vernon Howard

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance. — Socrates

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

Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first. — Ambrose Bierce

My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted. — Beverly Cleary

The English language has about 450,000 commonly used words, but more may be needed. What to you call someone who has lost a sibling or had a miscarriage? Or a gay person whose partner has died? Or an elderly person who has lost every friend and relative? So many heartaches can't be found in the dictionary. — Jeffrey Zaslow

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

Republican comes in the dictionary just after reptile and just above repugnant. — Julia Roberts

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

There is many a thing which the world calls disappointment; but there is no such thing in the dictionary of faith. What to others are disappointments are to believers intimations of the will of God. — John Newton

As an artist you're looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I'm striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they've swallowed a f... dictionary. — Damien Hirst

I always knew Gordon Lightfoot was a really great songwriter, but his stuff even sounds better and better all the time. It's just so really good to me. It's just like that's what should be in a dictionary, you know, next to a really good contempory folk song, is a Gordon Lightfoot song. — John Prine

I just wish they'd put a new word in the dictionary bigger than love because love just doesn't describe what I feel. — John Mayer

There is a word Kristos in the Greek dictionary, and this word is supposed to be borrowed from the Sanskrit word "Krishna," and Christ is derived from Kristos. — A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

The word 'romance,' according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime. — Billy Graham

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries. — Gilbert Murray

My Vocabularies vary, its so exclusionary You'll find my baby pictures in modern dictionaries Next to mighty mercenaries, and visual visionaries — Andre Nickatina

Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words "impartiality" and "objectivity" is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over. "Impartiality" and "objectivity" now mean the establishment point of view. — John Pilger

Trickle-down theories do not address the legitimate aspirations of the poor. We must lift those at the bottom so that poverty is erased from the dictionary of modern India. — Pranab Mukherjee

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know? — Steven Wright

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