Quotes on Language Words

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

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.

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.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

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.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

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.

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

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.

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.

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.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

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.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

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.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.