Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.

I think we've lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don't expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. And I think that's a great loss.

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.

Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism.

Our craving for generality has [as one] source ? our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is "purely descriptive.

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is not what ought to be. Science is descriptive not prescriptive it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed science disavows purposes.

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively that is but as a means of personal expression.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

Science is analytical descriptive informative. Man does not live by bread alone but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.