These vocabulary quotes will inspire you. Vocabulary is the body of words used in a particular language or words used on a particular occasion or in a particular sphere.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging vocabulary quotes, vocabulary sayings, and vocabulary proverbs.
Famous Vocabulary Quotes
- “One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.” ~ Evelyn Waugh
- “Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “You can’t build a vocabulary without reading. You can’t meet friends if you … stay at home by yourself all the time. In the same way, you can’t build up a vocabulary if you never meet any new words. And to meet them you must read. The more you read the better.” ~ Rudolf Flesch
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“Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation” ~ Robert Frost
- “Simply by changing your habitual vocabulary, you can instantaneously change how you think, how you feel, and how you live.” ~ Tony Robbins
- “All I know is what I have words for.” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
- “As vocabulary is reduced, so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!” ~ Sheri S. Tepper
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“A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.” ~ Sara Sheridan
- “People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multihued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.” ~ Tony Robbins
- “The last motive in the world for acquiring vocabulary should be to impress. Words should be acquired because we urgently need them – to convey, to reach, to express something within us, and to understand others.” ~ Vanna Bonta
- “Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.” ~ David Crystal
- “It’s like learning a language; you can’t speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.” ~ Fred Frith
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“A vocabulary of truth and simplicity will be of service throughout your life.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
- “We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community’s vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.” ~ Christopher Reeve
- “The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.” ~ Marilyn Hacker
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“Tired is not a word in my vocabulary.” ~ Brittany Murphy
- “It’s interesting to help someone find their vocabulary. There would not have been a De Niro without a Scorsese.” ~ Jason Patric
- “I’ve created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.” ~ Annie Leibovitz
- “As you can appreciate over my lifetime I’ve developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box.” ~ Adrian Belew
- “So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.” ~ Michael Polanyi
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“Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can’t articulate.” ~ Mos Def
- “”Stay” is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.” ~ Louisa May Alcott
- “Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.” ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
- “Of course, there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.” ~ Margaret Mahy
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“Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.” ~ Evan Esar
- “If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.” ~ Malcolm X
- “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
- “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.” ~ Helen Keller
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“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.” ~ Jim Morrison
- “The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.” ~ David Ogilvy
- “First, we have to find a common vocabulary for energy security. This notion has a radically different meaning for different people. For Americans, it is a geopolitical question. For the Europeans right now it is very much focused on the dependence on imported natural gas.” ~ Daniel Yergin
- “This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.” ~ William Labov
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“Poetry: the best words in the best order.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.” ~ Edward Sapir
- “In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.” ~ Harold Bloom
- “Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints –the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk –we think we’re using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we’re its slavish agents.” ~ Harry Mathews
- “It’s better to emphasize biblical theology, partly because there are fine Study Bibles already available that lean into systematic theology, and partly because biblical theology is particularly strong at helping readers see how the Bible hangs together in its own categories: that is, God in his infinite wisdom chose to give us his Word in the 66 canonical books, with all of their variations in theme, emphasis, vocabulary, literary form, and distinctive contributions across time.” ~ D. A. Carson
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“The greatest gift of life is friendship, and I have received it.” ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
- “A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.” ~ Elbert Hubbard
- “Pressure is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it’s because you’ve started to think of failure.” ~ Tommy Lasorda
- “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.” ~ Henry Ford
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“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” ~ Thomas Aquinas
- “Men make angry music and it’s called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they’re angry and militant.” ~ Ani DiFranco
- “Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness.” ~ Euripides
- “A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” ~ Walter Winchell
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“Sound is the vocabulary of nature.” ~ Pierre Schaeffer
- “Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” ~ Albert Camus
- “The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don’t need any fingers.” ~ Larry Flynt
- “The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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“I think the most overused words in our vocabulary in the South are black and white.” ~ Artur Davis
- “Retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren’t going to get rid of me that way.” ~ Betty White
- “Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.” ~ Tim Gunn
- “Live today. Remove all blame from your vocabulary. Catch yourself when you find yourself using your past history as a reason for your failure to act today, and instead say, ‘I am free now to detach myself from what used to be.'” ~ Wayne Dyer
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“In his head, his mother said, ‘People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper’.” ~ Maggie Stiefvater
- “One of the reasons I like immersing myself in different texts, putting myself in the company of other writers, is that they do change your vocabulary. They change what you write about or they change the length of lines.” ~ Martha Ronk
- “Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you’re going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.” ~ Robert Frost
- “The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.” ~ Clifton Fadiman
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“A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. … Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.” ~ Wade Davis
- “The mind is incredible. Once you’ve gained mastery over it, channeling its powers positively for your purposes, you can do anything. I mean anything. The secret is to make your mind work for you not against you. This means constantly being positive. Constantly setting up challenges you can meet either today, next week, or next month. “I can’t…” should be permanently stricken from your vocabulary, especially the vocabulary of your thoughts. You must see yourself always growing and improving.” ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
- “As photographers, we have to find our own identity, our own voice, our own vocabulary. And my question all the time is whether this vocabulary is limited, like our own vocabulary that goes from A to Zed, or whether this vocabulary can carry on growing. And to me, I hope that it carries on growing.” ~ Mario Testino
- “On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter “Z” constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter “Z” should be utterly excised–fully extirpated–absolutely heave-hoped from our communal vocabulary!” ~ Mark Dunn
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“Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the every day.” ~ John H. McWhorter
- “A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one’s thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.” ~ Henry Hazlitt
- “The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.” ~ Adam Phillips
Vocabulary is a list or collection of words or of words and phrases usually alphabetically arranged and explained or defined.
