Quotes About Language

I haven't ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

conversation is now pretty well a lost art.

Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath receiv'd our yoke.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

Such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.

The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.

There is no point where art so nearly touches nature as when it appears in the form of words.

Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary.

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.

Lexicography is a chastening as well as an illuminating and fascinating art.

I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.

A culture is not only the language and the arts of a people. It is all their history, all their hopes for the future.

Common Lisp is politics, not art.

Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.

We need to regain the art of civil discourse and more practically, I don't think you change anyone's mind by calling them names.

Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

No arts, no letters - no society.