language Quotes

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

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

The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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