Quotes About Language

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

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

Use the right word, not its second cousin.

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this 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.

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.

If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loudly. Do not compound mispronunciation with inaudibility

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just 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 away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from Disappearance of Literature

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.

There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Fenimore Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

When a prisoner of style escapes, it's called an evasion.