Language Quotes

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C.S. Lewis

A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories

George Eliot

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

Victor Hugo

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

James Fenimore Cooper

Language is the archives of history...Language is fossil poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.

J.K. Rowling

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

Oscar Wilde

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other---by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.

Oscar Wilde

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Katherine Anne Porter

Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'.

Ambrose Bierce

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

Bertrand Russell

Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

Language is fossil Poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

George Orwell

Poetry is the language of feeling.

W. Winter

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Prince Of Wales Charles

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Claude LeviStrauss

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic/ape/suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

June Jordan

Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.

Michel de Montaigne, 1580