Quotes about Language
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
— Ernest Hemingway
Words easy to be understood do often hit the mark; when high and learned ones do only pierce the air.
— John Bunyan
To defend his position he piles up text upon text, waves his sword like a blind-folded gladiator, rattles his noisy tongue, and ends with wounding no one but himself.
— Saint Jerome
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
— Samuel Beckett
If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.
— Samuel Beckett
Words are but the signs of ideas.
— Samuel Johnson
Classical quotation is a parole of literary men all over the world.
— Samuel Johnson
Words become low by the occasions to which they are applied, or the general character of them who use them; and the disgust which they produce arises from the revival of those images with which they are commonly united.
— Samuel Johnson
I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.
— Samuel Johnson
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
— Samuel Johnson
You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.
— JRR Tolkien
Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.
— Soren Kierkegaard