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.
~ Goethe
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.
~ Mark Twain
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
Language most shows a man speak that I may see thee.
~ Ben Jonson
True eloquence consists of saying all that should be not all that could be said.
~ La Rochefoucauld
Even if language is a living evolving organism we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive it can get sick.
~ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Our language one of our most precious natural resources deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands streams and whooping cranes.
~ James Lipton
His words were softer than oil yet they were drawn swords.
~ Bible
Language is an inventory of human experience.
~ L. W. Lockhart
Change is legitimate and inevitable for our language is a mighty river picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there but growing ever wider and richer.
~ Robert Macneil
The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflation.
~ James Reston
A word has its use Or like a man it will soon have a grave.
~ Edward Arlington Robinson
No matter how eloquently a dog may bark he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.
~ Bertrand Russell
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
~ May Sarton
Every utterance is an event and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view therefore is that no word ever means the same thing twice.
~ Louis B. Saloman
