Language Quotes

"Very foolish it is to use the wrong word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence, how is the stranger to know that? He is more like to search truth with a dagger." ~ Kim by Rudyard Kipling And whenever he spoke (which he did almost always), he took care to produce the very finest and longest words of which the vocabulary gave him the use, rightly judging that it was as cheap to employ a handsome, large, and sonorous epithet, as to use a little stingy one. ~ Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray "A word in earnest is as good as a speech." ~ Bleak House by Charles Dickens "Really it is very wholesome exercise, this trying to make one's words represent one's thoughts, instead of merely looking to their effect on others." ~ Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell "Puns are the smallpox of the language." ~ The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium. ~ Adam Bede by George Eliot He knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech. ~ The Battle Of The Strong by Gilbert Parker His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered. ~ The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens "We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words." ~ Black Beauty by Anna Sewell "And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?" ~ Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery