William Whewell Quotes

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

I accept the fact I am an unregenerate egghead.

A lot of fantasy names are too much. They’re too difficult to pronounce. I wanted the flavour of medieval England. I took actual names we still use today, like ‘Robert’, and in some case I tweaked them a little bit. I made ‘Edward’ into ‘Eddard’. If you look back at medieval times, no one knew how to spell their own names. There are a lot of variations that we’ve lost.

It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.

The words I AM are your sacred identification as God- your highest self. Take care how you use this terms because saying anything after I AM that's incongruent with God is really taking the Lord's name in vain!

You need names to get the movie made.

I love the intellectual type. They know everything and suspect nothing.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

Anger is meant to be acted on. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction. We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.

I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable.

J, n. A consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel . . . from a Latin verb, "jacere", "to throw," because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog's tail assumes that shape.

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

the fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical 'name it and claim it' variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one's immediate, self-identified needs.

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.

My friend goes, 'If you're going to use Rogaine, just put it somewhere you're going to remember to use it everyday.' So I put it right next to my Prozac. But now it just feels really pathetic using both of these products at the same time, 'cause if either one works, I don't really need the other one.

It's an old Aboriginal word meaning 'Let's get together and have fun'. They gave us the word because they had no further need for it.

We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word. From India, out of the Vedas, we still hear: On the spoken word, all the gods depend, all beasts and men; in the world live all creatures...The word is the name of the divine world.

A careless and blasphemous use of the name of the Divine Being is not only sinful, but it is also prima facie evidence of vulgar associations.

I've always done a bass and drum solo that lasts about 10 minutes. The main thing is to use it only when you need to.

LECTURER, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.

It's wisest always to be so clad that our friends need not ask us for our names.

We need fair rules of the road, so big corporations can't use their power to gain unfair advantages.