Quotes About Language

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

The third (sphere in which the world of relation arises): Life with spiritual beings. Here the relations is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We hear no You and yet addressed; we answer - creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth. Bt how can we incorporate into the world of the basic word that lies outside language?

We say 'far away'; the Zulu has for that a word which means, in our sentence form, 'There where someone cries out: "Oh mother, I am lost." ' The Fuegian soars above our analytic wisdom with a seven-syllabled word whose precise meaning is, 'They stare at one another, each waiting for the other to volunteer to do what both wish, but are not able to do.

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

Prefer the active voice unless there's a good reason for using the passive

Use clear, crisp, lively verbs to express the actions in your document, and avoid using noun strings.

Put accurate punctuation at the heart of your writing.

Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.

Arthur Scargill, the miners' leader and socialist, once told The Sunday Times, 'My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

La palabra «nostalgia» viene de la palabra compuesta griega nosto, que significa «ir a casa», y algos, que significa «dolor».

Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.

a quite novel kind of grammar and logic, according to which what is something is nothing

I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate. . . . It is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.

In the opinion of those delicate-eared persons, nothing could be more bitter or intemperate than Paul's language.

The theory that languages are tools used for particular purposes, sometimes for many different purposes, means that extinct languages belong neither in a museum of art nor in a museum of natural history. Tools are meant to be surpassed by better tools. Once they are, they should be preserved in a museum of technology, of human ingenuity, of the cultural past.

My old mum always said, if brains was gunpowder he couldn't blow his fucking eyebrows off.

A charismatic brand includes a dedication to aesthetics. Why? Because it's the language of feeling, and in a society that's information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.