The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.
Because [Russel Westbrook] is so rare and impacts the game in so many different ways, you see the usage and the amount of time he's playing and say, 'is this sustainable?' I look at it the other way. Are we playing the right way, are we playing together as a team, and what are his minutes like? This is not a guy that's playing 42 minutes a night. When he goes out there he's going to play to who he is, and I think he also understands that in order for our team to be the best we can be he's got to incorporate and help everybody grow as players.
An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that’s out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.
As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.
The Epistles in the New Testament have all of them a particular reference to the condition and usages of the Christian world at the time they were written.
Usage is like oxygen for ideas.
Once you turn something into something, its universal usage is over.
Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god - both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter.
The best helps to growth in grace are the ill usage, the affronts, and the losses which befall us. We should receive them with all thankfulness, as preferable to all others, were it only on this account, that our will has no part therein.
The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
Usage ain't always a matter of ought.
Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.
I still have trouble identifying grammatical structures by name, though I know them as matters of usage.
To assume that wealth or sexuality or the usage of power, any of these things are not void in nature, gives them a reality they don't actually have.
What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.
Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
Own one idea. Complete it. Map the current model of purchase and usage. Change how it is done so at least some part of the market uses only your product. Extend from that core user to a much broader universe. Describe your concept in a very short, "six-word story" - a la Ernest Hemingway: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn. "
The claims of no people, according to established policy and usage, are respected by any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity.
