Language Quotes

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them

Stephen King

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

Victor Hugo

This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

Mark Twain

The (Christian) doctrines are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

C.S. Lewis

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

Nathanael West

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Carl Sandburg

Language is the dress of thought.

Samuel Johnson

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Alexis de Tocqueville

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Simone Weil, Human Personality 1

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Mal Pancoast

Language is the archives of history.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be pass? before it gets into print.

Raymond Chandler

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Raymond Chandler

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White

I know your head aches. I know you're tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher's window. But think what you're trying to accomplish - just think what you're dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. And that's what you've set yourself out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will.

George Bernard Shaw

It's now what enters men's mouths that's evil. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

Paulo Coelho

Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape...if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.

Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech,

Style, is like a frog: you can dissect the thing, but it somehow dies in the process.

Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech,