Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
~ William Gibson
Who does not know another language does not know his own.
~ Goethe
To me the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe comfortable middle-of-the road policy. Above all our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road is the noblest task of the future.
~ Christian Morgenstern
Similes are like songs of love: They much describe they nothing prove.
~ Matthew Prior
Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.
~ Aeschylus
A language is a dialect with its own army and navy.
~ Max Weinreich
The word is half his that speaks and half his that hears it.
~ Michel De Montaigne
A single word often betrays a great design.
~ Jean Baptiste Racine
Words once spoken can never be recalled.
~ Wentworth Dillon
Some words are like the old Roman galleys large-scaled and ponderous. They sit low in the water even when their cargo is light.
~ William Jovanovich
It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours but the art of words exists too and will never be less important.
~ Vincent Van Gogh
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain
Words like eyeglasses blur everything that they do not make clear.
~ Joseph Joubert
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
~ Northrop Frye
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
~ David Hare
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
More than kisses letters mingle souls.
~ John Donne
I wonder what language truck drivers are using now that everyone is using theirs?
~ Beryl Pfizer
The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out communication is getting through.
~ Sydney J. Harris
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
~ George Bernard Shaw
The Englishman loves to roll his tongue around the word 'extraordinary'. It so pleases him that he is reluctant to finish the sound which goes on into harmonics and overtones. The North American publisher is likewise inclined.
~ R. I. Fitzhenry
Words are feminine deeds are masculine.
~ Baltasar Gracián
Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.
~ Blaise Pascal
When an idea is wanting a word can always be found to take its place.
Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.
~ Thomas Mann
In certain trying circumstances urgent circumstances desperate circumstances profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
Like stones words are laborious and unforgiving and the fitting of them together like the fitting of stones demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.
~ Edmund Morrison
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
~ Ezra Pound
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
~ Harold Pinter
The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression.
~ Anthony Burgess
Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.
~ Carl Sandburg
Man's command of the language is most important. Next to kissing it's the most exciting form of communication.
~ Oren Arnold
Plain English - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.
~ Jacques Barzun
Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
~ Gerald Brenan
The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.
~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A word after a word after a word is power.
~ Margaret Atwood
You have to fall in love with hanging around words.
~ John Ciardi
Language is the armoury of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Everyone hears only what he understands.
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
