The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: S.I. Hayakawa

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.

Man, I Am, Three

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people’s linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

language, linguistics

Few people…have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people’s speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

It is not true that ‘we have only one life to live’; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.