Quotes About Language

It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words .

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.

A gap will yawn, achingly, day by day, it will turn into a colossal pit, an abyss without foundation, a gradual invasion of words by margins, blank and insignificant, so that all of us, to a man, will find nothing to say.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for.

I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way- things I had no words for.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. Georgia O'Keeffe

The cliche is dead poetry.

There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. 

The name of a thing is not the thing.

Never let me hear that foolish word again.

Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.

But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.

I am the King of Rome, and above grammar.

The whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.

It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.

Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

Terminological inexactitude

When you get hungry enough, you find yourself speaking Spanish pretty well.