Quotes About Language

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.

Faith clearly means 'to move forward without knowing.' But for the last 300 years at least it's meant 'to know every-thing with certainty.' How has a word come to mean the exact opposite of what is originally meant?

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

When a German dives into a sentence, you won't see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.

They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.

When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it. This is Cooper.

The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

A verb has a hard enough time of it in this world when it is all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it a way over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

He would come in and say he changed his mind -- which was a gilded figure of speech, because he didn't have any.

There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

My friend has a baby. I'm recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.