“
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.
- Anne Hathaway
”
”
Carol Ann Duffy (The World's Wife)
“
Love is a word that is constantly heard,
Hate is a word that is not.
Love, I am told, is more precious that gold.
Love, I have read, is hot.
But hate is the verb that to me is superb,
And love but a drug on the mart.
Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But hating, my boy, is an art.
”
”
Ogden Nash (The Best of Ogden Nash)
“
Gratitude was never a noun; it's secretly a verb. It is not a place you accept defeat, settle in for broken dreams or call it the best life will get. Gratitude is getting out of laziness, self pity, denial and insecurity, in order to walk through that door God has been holding open for you this entire time.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
Tacenda originates from the Latin participle taceo for ‘I am silent’. Taceo is also the verb for ‘I am still or at rest’. Taceo reminds us silence isn’t a sign of weakness. It is a sign of rest, of certainty, of contentment. Silence is the best response to people who don’t deserve your words.
”
”
Parker S. Huntington (Devious Lies (Cruel Crown, #1))
“
There Comes the Strangest Moment
There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free--
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.
Skin's gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.
I want--my want. I love--my love. I'll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what's here to never go away.
I'll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…
Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You'd have sworn no one knew you more than you.
How many people thought you'd never change?
But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.
”
”
Kate Light
“
The voice came first, then the chill across her skin. A moment later, Noah Czerny joined her, dressed as always in his navy Aglionby sweater. Joined was perhaps the wrong verb. Manifested was better. The phrase trick of the light was even more superior. Trick of the mind was the best. Because it was rare that Blue noticed the moment Noah actually appeared. It wasn’t that he gently resolved into being. It was that somehow her brain rewrote the minute before to pretend that Noah had been slouching beside her all along.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
“
I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.
”
”
Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine)
“
Bumped uglies?” I repeated on a laugh. “You are a retired phone sex operator and the best you can come up with is ‘bump uglies’? I’m disappointed in you.” “Gland to gland combat? Slytherin in the Hufflepuff? Doing the monster mash? Verbing the adjective noun?” I
”
”
Jessica Gadziala (Shane (Mallick Brothers, #1))
“
VACILANDO v. Traveling when the experience itself is more important than the destination. The best laid plans are not usually conducive to spontaneous adventures. Not sure where to go? Great! Throw the map and the plans out the window, and follow your heart for a while instead. verb
”
”
Ella Frances Sanders (Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World)
“
Taste” is a noun and a verb: We all have it and we all do it. But we don’t all have a language or a system for understanding and expressing that experience… I knew chocolate was something I didn’t want to lose, but I didn’t have the words to communicate why it was so important to me, or the knowledge on how best to save it. Now I do.
”
”
Simran Sethi
“
Taste” is a noun and a verb: We all have it and we all do it. But we don’t all have a language or a system for understanding and expressing that experience… I knew chocolate was something I didn’t want to lose, but I didn’t have the words to communicate why it was so important to me, or the knowledge on how best to save it. Now I do.
”
”
Preeti Simran Sethi (Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love)
“
The best way to calibrate a question is to avoid verbs or words that illicit a yes-no answer, like "can" or "does". Instead, use reporter question words like "how " and "what" for open-ended responses, but be very careful of "why" because it often leads to defensiveness.
”
”
Brief Books (Summary of Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz)
“
When little, friends play house in order to pretend to be family, which is ironic because the beautify of friends is that they are chosen, not given. Should siblings, play friends? And so we 'make' friends or 'find' them? Emily Dickinson thought that the best verb was 'enact'.
”
”
Jessica Francis Kane (Rules for Visiting)
“
Depression [verb]
1. to put on
your best outfit
and feel
like you're dressing
a wound.
”
”
Andrea Gibson
“
You think I hate men. I guess I do, although some of my best friends...I don't like this position. I mistrust generalized hatred. I feel like one of those twelfth century monks raving on about how evil women are and how they must cover themselves up completely when they go out lest they lead men into evil thoughts. The assumption that the men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underrunning that ever we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn't question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St.Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift...well, you understand. For years I didn't take it personally.
So now it is difficult for me to call others bigots when I am one myself. I tell people at once, to warn them, that I suffer from deformation of character. But the truth is I am sick unto death of four thousand years of males telling me how rotten my sex is. Especially it makes me sick when I look around and see such rotten men and such magnificent women, all of whom have a sneaking suspicion that the four thousand years of remarks are correct. These days I feel like an outlaw, a criminal. Maybe that's what the people perceive who look at me so strangely as I walk the beach. I feel like an outlaw not only because I think that men are rotten and women are great, but because I have come to believe that oppressed people have the right to use criminal means to survive. Criminal means being, of course, defying the laws passed by the oppressors to keep the oppressed in line. Such a position takes you scarily close to advocating oppression itself, though. We are bound in by the terms of the sentence. Subject-verb-object. The best we can do is turn it around. and that's no answer, is it?
”
”
Marilyn French (The Women's Room)
“
I wanted to be a sex goddess. And you can laugh all you want to. The joke is on me, whether you laugh or not. I wanted to be one -- one of them. They used to laugh at Marilyn when she said she didn't want to be a sex-goddess, she wanted to be a human being. And now they laugh at me when I say, "I don't want to be a human being; I want to be a sex-goddess." That shows you right there that something has changed, doesn't it? Rita, Ava, Lana, Marlene, Marilyn -- I wanted to be one of them. I remember the morning my friend came in and told us that Marilyn had died. And all the boys were stunned, rigid, literally, as they realized what had left us. I mean, if the world couldn't support Marilyn Monroe, then wasn't something desperately wrong? And we spent the rest of the goddamned sixties finding out what it was. We were all living together, me and these three gay boys that adopted me when I ran away, in this loft on East Fifth Street, before it became dropout heaven -- before anyone ever said "dropout" -- way back when "commune" was still a verb? We were all -- old-movie buffs, sex-mad -- you know, the early sixties. And then my friend, this sweet little queen, he came in and he passed out tranquilizers to everyone, and told us all to sit down, and we thought he was just going to tell us there was a Mae West double feature on somewhere -- and he said -- he said -- "Marilyn Monroe died last" -- and all the boys were stunned -- but I -- I felt something sudden and cold in my solar plexus, and I knew then what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the next one. I wanted to be the next one to stand radiant and perfected before the race of man, to shed the luminosity of my beloved countenance over the struggles and aspirations of my pitiful subjects. I wanted to give meaning to my own time, to be the unattainable luring love that drives men on, the angle of light, the golden flower, the best of the universe made womankind, the living sacrifice, the end! Shit!
”
”
Robert Patrick (Kennedy's Children)
“
Lacking a verb, a nominal sentence has no built-in reference to the speaker or the occasion of speaking. Accordingly, nominal sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless character of maxims or folk-sayings (compare 'Finders keepers, losers weepers', with which children attempt to justify sudden appropriations through an appeal to ageless custom).
”
”
Alfred Mollin
“
Come then, let us do something!” said Davie.
“Come away,” rejoined Donal. “What shall we do first?”
“I don't know: you must tell me, sir.”
“What would you like best to do—I mean if you might do what you pleased?”
Davie thought a little, then said:
“I should like to write a book.”
“What kind of a book?”
“A beautiful story.”
“Isn’t it just as well to read such a book? Why should you want to write one?”
“Because then I should have it go just as I wanted it! I am always—almost always—disappointed with the thing that comes next. But if I wrote it myself, then I shouldn’t get tired of it; it would be what pleased me, and not what pleased somebody else.”
“Well,” said Donal, after thinking for a moment, “suppose you begin to write a book!”
“Oh, that will be fun!—much better than learning verbs and nouns!”
“But the verbs and nouns are just the things that go to make a story—with not a few adjectives and adverbs, and a host of conjunctions; and, if it be a very moving story, a good many interjections! These all you have got to put together with good choice, or the story will not be one you would care to read.—Perhaps you had better not begin till I see whether you know enough about those verbs and nouns to do the thing decently.
”
”
George MacDonald (Donal Grant George MacDonald)
“
Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
What I finally came to as I walked and prayed for you is the old, old story of getting the gospel clear in your own hearts and minds, making it clear to others, and doing it with only one motive — the glory of Christ. Getting the glory of Christ before your eyes and keeping it there — is the greatest work of the Spirit that I can imagine. And there is no greater peace, especially in the times of treadmill-like activity, than doing it all for the glory of the Lord Jesus. Think much of the Savior's suffering for you on that dreadful cross, think much of your sin that provoked such suffering, and then enter by faith into the love that took away your sin and guilt, and then give your work your best. Give it your heart out of gratitude for a tender, seeking, and patient Savior. Then every event becomes a shiny glory moment to be cherished — whether you drink tea or try to get the verb forms of the new language.
”
”
C. John Miller (The Heart of a Servant Leader: Letters from Jack Miller)
“
Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
Ambiguous use of pronouns.
Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”
Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”
The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”
Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”
Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.
Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft
“
I mean, what is an un-birthday present?” “A present given when it isn’t your birthday, of course.” Alice considered a little. “I like birthday presents best,” she said at last. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” cried Humpty Dumpty. “How many days are there in a year?” “Three hundred and sixty-five,” said Alice. “And how many birthdays have you?” “One.” “And if you take one from three hundred and sixty-five, what remains?” “Three hundred and sixty-four, of course.” Humpty Dumpty looked doubtful. “I’d rather see that done on paper,” he said. Alice couldn’t help smiling as she took out her memorandum-book, and worked the sum for him: Humpty Dumpty took the book, and looked at it carefully. “That seems to be done right—” he began. “You’re holding it upside down!” Alice interrupted. “To be sure I was!” Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. “I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right—though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now—and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents—” “Certainly,” said Alice. “And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!” “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!” “Would you tell me, please,” said Alice, “what that means?” “Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.
”
”
Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking-Glass)
“
What, then, were the original vowels in God’s name? Ultimately, we do not know. During the period of the divided kingdom, the name may have been pronounced something like “Yau,” with the “au” forming a diphthong rather than two separate syllables. Evidence from classical Hebrew (found in both Biblical and non-Biblical texts) and certain Greek renderings of the name, however, have led scholars generally to believe that “Yahweh” was the way in which the name eventually came to be pronounced. More significant is the meaning of the name Yahweh. For this there has been a wide range of suggestions: “Truly He!”; “My One”; “He Who Is”; “He Who Brings into Being”; “He Who Storms.” One of the best suggestions is that the name is a shortened form of a longer name, Yahweh Sabaoth (often rendered in English as “the LORD of Hosts” or “the LORD Almighty”; see, e.g., 2Sa 6:2). The word “Yahweh” itself is most likely a verb. Many other shortened names from the ancient Near East are verb forms, which is exactly what Yahweh appears to be. It comes from the Hebrew verb meaning “to be.” But if the first vowel really is an a-vowel, then the verb likely has a causative sense: “to cause to be.” Thus, a fairly literal translation of Yahweh Sabaoth would be “He Who Causes the Hosts (of Heaven) to Be.” In general, then, the name refers to the One who creates or brings into being. ◆ The Tetragrammaton in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in a modern scroll, with the vowel sounds of Adonay added. Wikimedia Commons Go to Index of Articles in Canonical Order 4:3 it became a snake.
”
”
Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
“
However, I’ve come to learn that the concept of Pride is perhaps best seen as a goal or even as a verb and something we are all striving for on our personal journeys – to learn that we are all valid, important, and ultimately, enough – while we hopefully work towards achieving this for other people.
”
”
Tom Allen (No Shame)
“
Here are a couple of simple, practical tricks to determine if a service is not RESTful: If the name of the service is a verb instead of a noun, the service is likely RPC and not RESTful. If the name of the service to be executed is encoded in the request body, the service is likely RPC and not RESTful. If the back-button in the web-application does not work as expected, the service is not stateless and not RESTful. If the service or website does not behave as expected after turning cookies off, the service is not stateless and not RESTful.
”
”
Matthias Biehl (RESTful API Design: Best Practices in API Design with REST)
“
Scene by scene, look at the verbs you’ve chosen: Are they the best verbs, the most active, the most surprising? Or are they more pedestrian, everyday, overly mundane? Replacing even some of the most typical verbs with more precise and interesting ones will lift the level of your prose.
”
”
Matt Bell (Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts)
“
But note that there are plenty of reasons you might use to be: the goal here isn’t to eliminate it entirely, only to be sure you’re always using the strongest verb you can, on your way to making the best sentence possible.
”
”
Matt Bell (Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts)
“
Seeing and inspiring the best in others requires God’s vision. — Dena Netherton
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
I’m trying to learn to be on my best behavior with those I love the most.
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Seeing and inspiring the best in others requires God’s vision. — Dena Netherton —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” —2 Corinthians 12:9
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Telling others the Gospel message is one of the best ways to love them. — Jerry Hamilton
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Sometimes the best way to exchange love is to graciously receive a gift. — Jeanette Gardner Littleton —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Sometimes the best use of resources is a gift or event that says, “I care.” — Jeanette Gardner Littleton
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
If you want to show your best love for God, obey Him. — Karl Cumberland —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
The best way we can make sure kids will grow up to be considerate adults is to demonstrate love for others while they’re still small. — Jim D. Ferguson —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the verb to coach as to “tutor, train, give hints to, prime with facts.” This does not help us much, for those things can be done in many ways, some of which bear no relationship to coaching. Coaching is as much about the way these things are done as about what is done. Coaching delivers results in large measure because of the supportive relationship between the coach and the coachee, and the means and style of communication used. The coachee does acquire the facts, not from the coach but from within himself, stimulated by the coach. Of course, the objective of improving performance is paramount, but how that is best achieved is what is in question.
”
”
John Whitmore (Coaching for Performance Fifth Edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership UPDATED 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
“
Sometimes love is best communicated in quiet service to one another. — Jennifer C. Hoggatt —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Sometimes we love best when we just listen. — Deb Vellines
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Knowing is not enough. Loving is the best part of knowing. — Joseph Compaine —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Sometimes we love best when we just listen. — Deb Vellines —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Prayer can be the best way to show love toward those important to us. — Michael K. Farrar —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Let’s start simple—what’s your verb?” Carl asks. “What do you mean, my verb?” “A nurse nurses, teachers teach and preachers preach. If you could only choose one verb to describe what you do best, what is it?
”
”
Ian Bull (The Picture Kills (The Quintana Adventures))
“
Quote' is a verb; 'quotation', a noun. Lazy tongues attached to empty minds have taken the distinction from us. Before we lament, let us consider that the best languages may be the most streamlined. We certainly trend in that direction.
”
”
D.F. Downing
“
God calls us into personal relationships with Him. We share Him best when we personally relate to others. — Katherine Mitchell —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
the best way to forget our own difficulties is to reach out and bless someone else. — Linda Jett —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
Sometimes the best way to forget our own difficulties is to reach out and bless someone else. — Linda Jett —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
February 16 One Horse, Three Friends He does great things too marvelous to understand. He performs countless miracles. —Job 5:9 It was time to say good-bye. The vet frowned, “I’ll be back at ten to put him down.” Colic is the number one killer of horses, and Cash’s condition was much worse. His twisted gut left no room for hope. Without hope, I went down on my knees crying out to God. My year had been much like Job’s. “He’s my best friend—the only one who loves me, and now you’re taking him too. Please God, no!” I called my friends with the news. Within an hour, Debbie and Patti came to pray and, I thought, say their good-byes. Instead, Debbie pulled out her anointing oil and prayed like I’d never heard. “Where’s your faith?” was her only comment as we applied heating pads, oil, and rubbed his stomach for hours. Finally Debbie stood. “He’s going to live.” Within minutes, Cash lifted his head and pounded the barn door. I let him out and he ran full speed. The vet returned to scratch her head. “This is not possible.” With the love of friends and a horse, God chose to perform a miracle that night in the same place He did two thousand years ago: a stable. When God shows His love through a miracle, our lives are never the same. — Renee Shuping Cassidy —
”
”
Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
“
I wake up each day with the firm conviction that I am nowhere near my full potential. ‘Greatness’ is a verb.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
“
Probably in no other language in the world is poetic license so freely permitted and indulged in as in Persian. The construction of sentences follows no rule; the order of words is just that which the individual poet chooses to adopt, and the idea of time — past, present, and future — is ignored in the use of tenses, that part of a verb being alone employed which rhymes the best.
”
”
Saadi (Delphi Collected Works of Saadi)
“
Verb Over Noun (The Sonnet)
I do the best of my writing,
When I don't feel like a writer.
I create the best of my philosophy,
When I don't feel like a philosopher.
I write the best of my poetry,
When I don't deem myself a poet.
I publish the best of my science,
Walking just a pilgrim of knowledge.
Labels we hold dear often hold us captive,
So do not take the acronym for the act.
Designations can't contain the designated,
Move past the noun and let the verb enact.
”
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Abhijit Naskar (Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat)
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Core words are the most frequently used words in communication. Studies in which researchers analyze language samples from different populations and contexts have shown that there are approximately three hundred to four hundred words that make up about 80 percent of everything we say.20 Core words are typically verbs, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, and prepositions. The most effective AAC systems are set up to teach core vocabulary first “because it allows communicators to express a wide variety of concepts with a very small number of words. Since core words make up the majority of spoken language, focusing on core vocabulary allows many opportunities throughout the day to hear the same words being used in a natural environment.”21 Using core words sets the learner up for their best communication success.
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Christina Hunger (How Stella Learned to Talk: The Groundbreaking Story of the World's First Talking Dog)
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Rabbi Zusha of Hanipoli (eighteenth century) was famous for his simple faith. Many stories are told about him, but perhaps the best · known relates his response to students who asked why his teachings were different from those of his own teacher. Zusha's answer was: "When I come before the judges of the heavenly tribunal, they are not going to ask if I lived my life like Moses, or if I lived my life like Abraham. They are going to ask me if I lived my life to be the best Zusha I could be.
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David A. Cooper (God Is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism)
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Here is his secret set down in his own words—words that ought to be cast in eternal bronze and hung in every home and school, every shop and office in the land— words that children ought to memorise instead of wasting their time memorising the conjugation of Latin verbs or the amount of the annual rainfall in Brazil—words that will all but transform your life and mine if we will only live them: ‘I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,’ said Schwab, ‘the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. ‘There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticise anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.
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Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People)
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Always there was the word. Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have expanded into the single substance of the linguistic world. It was a handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole; verb, noun, modifier; yes, even conjunction. It described food, fatigue, metaphysics. It stood for everything and meant nothing; an insulting word, it was never used to insult; crudely descriptive of the sexual act, it was never used to describe it; base, it meant the best; ugly, it modified beauty; it was the name and the nomenclature of the voice of emptiness, but one heard it from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s — until, finally, one could only surmise that if a visitor unacquainted with English were to overhear our conversations he would, in the way of the Higher Criticism, demonstrate by measurement and numerical incidence that this little word must assuredly be the thing for which we were fighting.
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Robert Leckie (Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific)
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The best, most elegant microinteractions are often those that allow users a variety of verbs with the fewest possible nouns.
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Dan Saffer (Microinteractions: Full Color Edition: Designing with Details)
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The first of these four parts of the self, and the only one made of solid matter, was the hamr. Hamr literally meant "skin" or "hide," but was essentially the same as what we today would call the "body." It was the visible part of the self that housed the invisible parts...
...One of the three invisible, spiritual parts of the self was the hugr. The hugr was someone's personality or mind, the intangible part that corresponds most closely to what we mean when we speak of someone's "inner self." It encompassed thought, desire, intuition (the Old Norse word for "foreboding" was hugboð), and a person's
presence" - the feeling others get when they're around the person...
...The second of the spiritual parts of the self was the fylgja (plural fylgjur). The verb fylgja meant "to accompany," "to help," "to side with," "to belong to," "to follow," "to lead," "to guide," or "to pursue" depending on the context. The fylgja spirit did all of those many things, and the best translation of the noun fylgja is probably "attendant spirit," in both senses of the word "attendant" - one who accompanies and one who helps...
...The final part of the Viking self we'll examine here is the hamingja, "luck" or "fortune" (plural harningjur). In the words of Old Norse scholar Bettina Sommer, "luck was a quality inherent in the man and his lineage, a part of his personality similar to his strength, intelligence, or skill with weapons, at once both the cause and the expression of the success, wealth, and power of a family." The surest test of the strength of a person's hamingja was his or her fortune in battle.
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Daniel McCoy (The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion)
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Notice I said that “the pattern grows” and not how we can “grow the pattern.” Most of us use grow in the transitive sense. We say we grew the business, we grew flowers, we grew the economy. Grammarians have relented on this usage over the years, but traditionally grow was an intransitive verb that didn’t take an object. You can plant and cultivate and fertilize corn, but really, the corn grows itself. I would urge us all to recognize what we can—and can’t—control as we talk about how Constellations grow and what patterns they follow.
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Matthew Barzun (The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go)
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Dee Hock had the word educe; Jacobs had ramify. It’s the root of ramification, as in consequences. But ramify alone means to branch or differentiate. It is an active verb. She felt that the branching is where energy finds new opportunity—branching out a new brand or product line, branching into a new location. It’s these small, repetitive evolutions that make a profound impact over time. The more dynamic the environment—the more people you have with this mindset—the more energy will be created. And energy, which is just power repeatedly given away and returned, is the coin of the realm.
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Matthew Barzun (The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go)
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Someone, everyone, anyone, no one, everybody, nobody, anybody, somebody, something, everything, anything, nothing, each, either, and neither are some common indefinite pronouns that are singular. They always use a singular verb (for example, is rather than are).
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Arlene Miller (The Best Little Grammar Book Ever!: Speak and Write with Confidence/Avoid Common Mistakes)
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I wake up each day with the firm conviction that I am nowhere near my full potential. ‘Greatness’ is a verb.” These words came to me one morning in a flash of awareness and insight. I have miles to go before I sleep, and so I will spend my remaining years desperately looking to improve who I am from year to year. Greatness is not a final destination, but a series of small acts done daily in order to constantly rejuvenate and refresh our skills in a daily effort to become a better version of ourselves.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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As we enter a new year, I’m reminded that we can’t cling to the security of the past, or even today. We have to keep moving on into an insecure future, where we don’t know what will happen. But we don’t move into the future alone. The One who loves us best will be there with us every step of the way.
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Sometimes the best use of resources is a gift or event that says, “I care.” — Jeanette Gardner Littleton —
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)