Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.
Sep 17, 2025
In the Trump language, words change their meaning day by day depending on his own political needs.
Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, and sand eddies in a whirlwind.
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
A man reacheth not to excellence with one language.
As a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one tongue.
The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
I love language, words, and all the lovely, exciting, and heart wrenching things you can do with them. Pick the right ones, put them in the right order, and you’ve created a moment in time where the reader forgets about the late car payment, the dirty dishes, the impending workweek. You have created a state of bliss. Or negligence, depending on your perspective.
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.
He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
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.
Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
All collections loaded