Quotes About Language

Language is an inventory of human experience.

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflation.

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.

Every utterance is an event, and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view, therefore, is that no word ever means the same thing twice.

If you can teach me a new word, I'll walk all the way to China to get it.

When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.

Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way.

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

Thought flies and words go on foot.

You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

When the style is fully formed, if it has a sweet undersong, we call it beautiful, and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.

Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

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 if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Whatever we conceive well we express clearly.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

The pen is mightier than the sword. The [??n!$] is mightier than the pen.

We are slaves to words. Speak often enough of an unreal thing, and after a while it becomes real. For instance, we have used the word "nation" for centuries. There is, however, no such thing as a nation. All that really exists is the individuals that compose a nation.