Quotes About Grammar

Bad music is the attempt to imitate something that has very strong rules and grammar.

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.

Greek normally uses a singular verb when the subject is neuter plural. It is an indication that the writer is viewing the plural subject not as a collection of items but as a single group.

The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It

People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars – at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language – by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.

Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.

Why isn't the word "phonetically" spelled with an "f"?

After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

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

No one likes a person that "should of" all over the place.

What happened when the Verb asked the noun to conjugate? She said "no-no!", forgot the "o" and decided to become a nun!

The idle mind, which demands rules, i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing with it, he will use imperfective, if he stands outside and merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use the perfective

I have had a suspicion all my life that in the current dictionaries and grammars often the real explanation and origin of a word or a grammatical form is to be found in something that comes in just at the end as a 'derived' form or 'exceptional' use. This I believe to be the case with the aorist; the true primitive essential aorist I believe to be the gnomic, the temporal aorist a later derivative, in fact the aorist I believe to be primarily not a tense at all but an aspect.

Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all , it has only aspects.

No one knows better than this accomplished scholar [Professor Kennett] and no one could say more plainly that all the supposed futures in 'prophecies' have nothing to do with the future at all. Oh what burning controversies might have been saved had only theologians known a little more grammar!

Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.

Madame Bellwings, Memoir Elf Coordinator, was not at all pleased with this request, because elves who write the memoirs of teenage girls have the habit of returning to the magical realm with atrocious grammar. They can't seem to shake the phrases "watever" and "no way," and they insert the word like into so many sentences that the other elves start slapping them...and for no apparent reason occasionally call out the name Edward Cullen.