Quote#Art
Realizing the difficulty of painting in word colors a land so…
Quote byJohn Wesley Powell · 1834–1902
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Canyons of the Colorada (1895), Preface.
English (original)
Realizing the difficulty of painting in word colors a land so strange, so wonderful, and so vast in its features, in the weakness of my descriptive powers I have sought refuge in graphic illustration.
— John Wesley Powell
More from John Wesley Powell
The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.
Indian nouns are extremely connotive; that is, the name does more than simply denote the thing to which it belongs; in denoting the object, it also assigns to it some quality or characteristic.
The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language.
Years of drought and famine come and years of flood and famine come, and the climate is not changed with dance, libation or prayer.
Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words.
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