Alphabet Quotes
More Alphabet Quotes
I'm going down 2 alphabet Street I'm gonna crown the first girl that I meet I'm gonna talk so sexy She'll want me from my head 2 my feet.
prince— Alphabet St.
[T]hat the Universe was formed by a fortuitous Concourse of Atoms ... I will no more believe, than that the accidental Jumbling of the Letters of the alphabet, could fall by Chance into a most ingenious and learned Treatise of Philosophy.
— Jonathan Swift, "A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind" (1708)
I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.
Ludwig van Beethoven— "A meeting of minds", The Guardian, 18 November 2005.
The boats, and trains, and cows and horses were quite meaningless to him, but not quite so baffling as the odd little figures which appeared beneath and between the colored pictures — some strange kind of bug he thought they might be, for many of them had legs though nowhere could he find one with eyes and a mouth. It was his first introduction to the letters of the alphabet, and he was over ten years old.
Edgar Rice Burroughs— Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles
Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable expectations and eventual disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around the room with royal-blue chickens.
fran lebowitz— "Parental Guidance"
You silly old fool, you don't even know the alphabet of your own silly old business.
william henry maule— Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 86.
To me, the circle and the square where the sky and the earth, as symbolized by the ancient Oriental religions; they formed a kind of rudimentary alphabet by means of which everything could be expressed with the most limited means. They evoked prehistoric runes and the early I-Ching, or Book of Changes.
michel seuphor— p. 98 (Abstract Painting (1964))
Of covetousness, we may truly say that it makes' both the Alpha and Omega in the devil's alphabet, and that it is the first vice in corrupt nature which moves, and the last which dies.
robert south— P. 167. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge.
donald e. westlake— What's So Funny? (2007)
We have been housekeeping a fortnight, now long enough to have learned how to pronounce the servants' names, but not how to spell them. We shan't ever learn to spell them; they were invented in Hungary and Poland, and on paper they look like the alphabet out on a drunk.
mark twain— p. 121. (Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010))
A life given to determining the best form for the letters of the alphabet does it seem extraordinary to you? But no day passes that our eyes do not fall upon something that was influenced, and made better, by this extraordinary, eccentric Scot, and if that is not a life well spent, I should be interested in a better definition.
Robertson Davies— Edward Johnston (1960)
A scholar like myself who is not a Sinologist and yet ventures the proposition that Chinese languages should be rewritten in the Greek alphabet (or "Romanized", to use the current term) is treading on uncharted territory (for him) and does so at his peril.
eric a. havelock— "Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)
Over the years, I have become convinced that Hellenism as a culture represents not a static condition of uniform sublimity mysteriously achieved and maintained as an effect of some racial advantage. Rather it should be understood as an evolving process, governed by a dynamic of change, as both language and thought underwent transformational alteration caused by a transition from orality to literacy. The instrument of change is discerned to be the invention of the Greek alphabet, at a quite late stage in the history of developing cultures.
eric a. havelock— "Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)
What our story, however, has demonstrated is the astonishingly checkered, not to say hazardous, career of a reading device which we in the West now take so much for granted. Historians have acclaimed the "triumph of the alphabet," but the triumph was often compromised, sometimes bitterly contested, and to this day is only half won.
eric a. havelock— "Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)
Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers.
harold innis— Minerva's Owl p.11.
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
Marshall McLuhan— p. 15 ("The Agenbite of Outwit")
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
Marshall McLuhan— p. 17 ("The Agenbite of Outwit")
The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
Marshall McLuhan— p. 74 ("The Agenbite of Outwit")
Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.
Herman Melville— Bk. XXV, ch. 4
Man's books are but man's alphabet, Beyond and on his lessons lie The lessons of the violet, The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil: The toil that nature ever taught, The patient toil, the constant stir, The toil of seas where shores are wrought, The toil of Christ, the carpenter; The toil of God incessantly By palm-set land or frozen sea.
joaquin miller— "The Larger College".
You silly old fool, you don't even know the alphabet of your own silly old business.
— Attributed to Judge William Henry Maule. in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 85-87.
The ‘musical notes’ in Bharata Natyam are the adavus – units of dance which contain in them the alphabet and grammar of the dance.
— In "The Routledge Dance Studies Reader" p.185
Of covetousness, we may truly say that it makes' both the Alpha and Omega in the devil's alphabet, and that it is the first vice in corrupt nature which moves, and the last which dies.
— Robert South, p. 167. (Envy)
We are not stating by accident that Josip Broz Tito is Jesus Christ for Macedonia, a father and a mother for Macedonia. Because we have, in that time, after NOB, for the first time created a Macedonian alphabet, a Macedonian television, a Macedonian state, a language, a passport, an identity card, a university for the first time, a Macedonian academy for the first time. We, communists, have created the Macedonian Orthodox church.
— Slobodan Ugrinovski (?), politician of the FYROM and the current leader of the left-wing political party Union of Tito's Left Forces, "Tito e Isus Hristos za Makedonija" ("Tito is Jesus Christ for Macedonia"), A1 TV, FYROM May 04 2009.
The peculiar system of alphabetic numerals evolved by him with 33 consonants of the Sanskrit alphabet (Nagari script) denoted various numbers in conjunction with vowels which themselves did not represent any numerical value. For example khyughr (=khu+yu+ghr) is denoted by 2x100 +30x100^2+4x10^3 =4300,000 which is the number of revolutions of the Sun in a yuga (epoch)
— In, p.245 (Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures)
