Written Language Quotes

• Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.

  Marilyn vos Savant

  Literature, Language, Spoken English

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  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.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Honesty, Integrity, Writing

  1847; quoted by propagandist and language maven William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 13 December 1998.

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• The chief virtue that language can have is clarity.

  Hippocrates

  Writing, Editing, Plain Language

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• 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.

  William Penn

  Writing, Language Words, Plain Language

  William Penn (1792). “Fruits of Solitude: In Reflections and Maxims Relating to the Conduct of Human Life”, p.130

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• A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

  William Strunk, Jr.

  Writing, Should Have, Drawing

  The Elements of Style ch. 2 (1918)

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• Use the smallest word that does the job.

  E. B. White

  Jobs, Writing, Doe

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• Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Plain Language, Ideas

  Mark Twain (1990). “Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 2: 1867-1868”, p.183, Univ of California Press

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• One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

  Quintilian

  Writing, Impossible, Language

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• Thoughts are created in the act of writing. [It is a myth that] you must have something to say in order to write. Reality: You often need to write in order to have anything to say. Thought comes with writing, and writing may never come if it is postponed until we are satisfied that we have something to say...The assertion of write first, see what you had to say later applies to all manifestations of written language, to letters...as well as to diaries and journals

  Frank Smith

  Writing, Reality, Order

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• Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

  William Butler Yeats

  Inspirational, Wise, Teamwork

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• The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Inspirational, Motivational, Teaching

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• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Communication, Writing, Mean

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• Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Communication, Plain Language, Imagination

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2001). “On the Constitution of the Church and State”, p.326, Classic Books Company

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• 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.

  George Orwell

  Truth, Real, Political Language

  "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

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• Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Speech, Language, Human Nature

  Alfred North Whitehead (1968). “Modes of Thought”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

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• The shorter and the plainer the better.

  Beatrix Potter

  Writing, Language

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• One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

  Hart Crane

  Inspirational, Writing, Men

  Hart Crane (1965). “Letters, 1916-1932”

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• The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

  George Eliot

  Writing, Simple, Language Words

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• One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

  Hart Crane

  Creative Writing, Power Of Language, Written Word

  Brom Weber, Hart Crane (1970). “Hart Crane: a biographical and critical study”

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• Men of few words are the best men." (3.2.41)

  William Shakespeare

  Men, Few Words

  'Henry V' (1599) act 3, sc. 2, l. [40]

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• A drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

  William Strunk, Jr.

  Writing, Should Have, Drawing

  The Elements of Style ch. 2 (1918)

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• I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

  Truman Capote

  Believe, Writing, Editing

  Lawrence Grobel, Truman Capote (1986). “Conversations with Capote”, Plume

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• As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Doubt, Adjectives

  Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) ch. 11

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• Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Writing, Editing, Mind

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• When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Sarcastic, War, Sarcasm

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