Quotes About Language

Words are less needful to sorrow than to joy.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

I write as a sow piddles.

Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.

I don't want to be patronizing . . . that means "talking down."

Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.

What the orators want in depth, they give you in length.

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.

I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.

Of puns it has been said that those most dislike who are least able to utter them.

He that would pun would pick a pocket.

Evil spelled backward is live.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

If you can't write your message in a sentence, you can't say it in an hour.

Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.

Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.