Quotes About Language

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.

The gentle art of gastronomy is a friendly one. It hurdles the language barrier, makes friends among civilized people, and warms the heart.

Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. —Chinese Proverb

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Don't accustom yourself to use big words for little matters

Words become low by the occasions to which they are applied, or the general character of them who use them; and the disgust which they produce arises from the revival of those images with which they are commonly united.

Language is the only instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations

To a poet nothing can be useless.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

Greek, sir, is like lace; every man gets as much of it as he can.

Lexicographer—A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

If someone sent you a suicide note," Gertrude said. "You'd correct the spelling and send it back to them." "They'd at least die grammatically," said Alice.

War is always a contest of words as well as of wounds.

Tarih Sümer'de Ba?lar

was nothing known of Sumerian culture; the very existence of a Sumerian people and language was unsuspected. The scholars and archeologists who some hundred years ago began excavating in Mesopotamia were

First, the linguistic difficulties. Sumerian is neither a Semitic nor an Indo-European language. It belongs to the so-called agglutinative type of languages exemplified by Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish.

Une langue implique obligatoirement l'existence d'un groupe culturel, plus ou moins considérable, avec sa mentaliteé.