Quotes About Language

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought!... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

When you unprose language, does it become poetry?

Poetry is emotion put into measure.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

If a poet writes in gibberish, his soul yet understands.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. The love of language is either itself a poetic gift or a symptom of it.

A poem compresses much in a tight space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

A poet rips his flesh on the thorn of language and bleeds raw ink onto paper petals.

Poetry cries melodic tears of verse.

A poet rarely swashes ink but mostly mists at subtleties.

Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

What flowers are to gardens, spices to food, gems to a garment, and stars to heaven; such are proverbs interwoven in speech.

A proverb is to speech what salt is to food.

A proverb is an ornament to language.

As the country so the proverb.

Of course, talking only in proverbs would be impossible. Proverbs are full of poetry and twists. They are made up of words that have been molded for centuries, if not milleniums, until a minimum of words carry an extraordinary potential for meaning.

Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

Newsflash: air quotes are out.

There is no way you can use the word "reality" without quotation marks around it.

Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.