Noun Quotes

Here is God's purpose - for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper. (Buckminster Fuller)
I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
Ludicrous concepts...like the whole idea of a "war on terrorism". You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary? View quote
Terry Jones
To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun. View quote
Gore Vidal
When I said. "A rose is a rose is a rose." And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do? I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun. View quote
Gertrude Stein
But suppose we take the noun 'truth': here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation. View quote
J. L. Austin
Good is a noun rather than an adjective. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do. It's the way you love your partner every day. View quote
Barbara De Angelis
Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. View quote
Martha Graham
Terrorist', noun: 1. Someone my government tells me is a terrorist; 2. Someone my President decides to kill. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
Theres only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence-a noun, a verb, and 9/11. (Joe Biden)
I didn't know what I was. I didn't have a noun. View quote
Rob Sheffield
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image. View quote
Elaine de Kooning
The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding. View quote
Benjamin Lee Whorf
God is a verb, not a noun. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. View quote
Gregory Peck
The word model is used as a noun, adjective, and verb, and in each instance it has a slightly different connotation. As a noun "model" is a representation in the sense in which an architect constructs a small-scale model of a building or a physicist a large-scale model of an atom. As an adjective "model" implies a degree or perfection or idealization, as in reference to a model home, a model student, or a model husband. As a verb "to model" means to demonstrate, to reveal, to show what a thing is like. View quote
Russell L. Ackoff
I think that we all do heroic things, but hero is not a noun, it's a verb. View quote
Robert Downey Jr.
It was ready-made for them to call an emergency and pretend it was war-time, you know, the war on terrorism is a metaphor, and terrorism is an abstract noun. It's like a "war on dandruff." There's no such thing, you know. It isn't war, it's just a slogan. But using the slogan they got through the U. S. A. Patriot Act, which removes many of our liberties. Nobody made a sound when we lost Habeas Corpus-due process of law-and suddenly Bush managed to get rid of it. Where was a voice on television, aside from mine, that spoke out against this? Where were all those noble jurists, those great lawyers, those lovers of liberty, where the hell were they? They were nowhere! View quote
Gore Vidal
Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose. View quote
Gertrude Stein
I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite, or Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored. Why should we want to lose being a Negro... I have stated that a noun to me is a stupid thing, if you know a thing and its name why bother about it but you have to know its name to talk about it. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong names and so let us keep them. (Gertrude Stein)
Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb. View quote
Edward Sapir
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun. View quote
Stephen Fry
parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat. View quote
Jodi Picoult