Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

He should have known better because, early in his learnings under his brother Mahmoud, he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictable changing their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok. Short human words were never like a short Martian word - such as grok which forever meant exactly the same thing. Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife. And this had been a very short word.

In Chinese, there are an impressive number of ways to describe saying nothing at all.

For your information, I would like to ask a question.

I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I'm thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

What are the questions you wish to ask?

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?

Hey Yog, what time is it? You mean right now?

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.

There are lots of questions which have to be answered.

The questions that are beyond the reach of economics-the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life-may be inconvenient but they are important.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

A picture can be an answer as well as a question but if you can't answer your question try to question your question... There can be questions without answers but no answers without questions.

Skepticism may undermine beliefs, but never belief.

Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'

English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

One can do without solutions. Only the questions matter. We may share them or turn away from them.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

It is always better to ask then to make an assumption.

Many things are lost for want of asking.

Ask the next question.

Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?