Quotes About Language

I don't like ten dollar words. Anybody can do anything with a thesaurus. Make me feel a certain way with the least amount of words possible and I respect that.

I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

Words are in this respect like water, that they often take their taste, flavour, and character, from the mouth out of which they proceed, as the water from the channel through which it flows.

Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.

I have a song about how much I hate emojis and the lazy thinking of people who use them. I wish that more people had respect for the English language.

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.

Saying "muff" to someone and trying to be romantic is incredibly difficult.

I wanted to be the writer in the room setting depth charges of feeling out the world with my language.You know, I had a very romantic idea about that.But I grew into being a performer.

I want to eat good Italian food and get better at their language. It seems so romantic too.

When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language

Oh for Christ sakes. Ay carrumba, chimichanga. I have no idea what you're saying, but shut your pretty pie hole.

But for the unquiet heart and brain A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

Taal verwoordt slechts de onmogelijkheid om je uit te drukken.

Olmo Panero a traversé les Pyrénées pour nous dire que les mots étaient des parenthèses de silence.

Words can be powerful allies. Or enemies

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

People caught in a homeland-trap: to speak now in this weary language, a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled, it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it most certainly not beautiful

If you try to follow the language of thought in your own mind, you will not find even the simplest sentences- only shreds, fragments of sentences, scattered as after an explosion, have greater effect on the reader than the same thoughts and images arranged in regular, steady, marching ranks?...because you meet the reader's natural instinctive need. You do not compel him to skim

Homo sapiens is only man, in the fullest sense of the word, when his grammar contains no question marks, only exclamation marks, commas, and periods. And so today, at

viteza pe secunda a limbii trebuie sa fie intotdeauna ceva mai mica decat viteza pe secunda a gandirii, in nici un caz invers.

All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

Much of what one does--to avoid suffering, to seek happiness, to stay healthy--is to keep a safe space for one's private language.