Grammar Quotes - Page 15

• Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.

  Charlton Laird

  Latin, Made, Scholar

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• Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.

  Peter Farb

  Community, Way, Speech

  Peter Farb (2015). “Word Play: What Happens When People Talk”, p.240, Vintage

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• Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.

  John Dryden

  Tree, Verbs, Nouns

  John Dryden, Joseph Warton, John Warton (1811). “The Poetical Works of John Dryden: Containing Original Poems, Tales and Translations”, p.353

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• Bush is almost always clear when he's speaking cruelly. For example, when the subject is the punitive infliction of great pain, there is no problem with his syntax, grammar, or vocabulary, even if he happens to be lying. ... On the other hand, our president is extraordinarily tongue-tied when he's trying, off the cuff, to sound a note of idealism, magnanimity or -- especially -- compassion.

  Mark Crispin Miller

  Pain, Lying, Compassion

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• What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Negative, Doe, Morality

  Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1960). “the Revolt of the Masses”

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• The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Latin, Speaks Out, Devil

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• Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?

  Tom Robbins

  School, Magic, Sorcery

  "The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins". Interview with Tony Vigorito, realitysandwich.com. 2012.

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• What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

  George Eliot

  Omission, Sublime, Poet

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.42, Penguin

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• No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.

  Richard Whately

  Complaining, Use, Logic

  Richard Whately (1867). “Rhetoric”, p.9

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• I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. In that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians. To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.

  Max Muller

  Mean, Eye, Hair

  "Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas". Book by Max Müller, 1888.

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• A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  May, Matter, Made

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees (1975). “Philosophical remarks”, Barnes & Noble

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• All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers. If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants.

  William Cobbett

  Writing, Views, Tyrants

  Political Register, August 14, 1819.

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• Although our grammar schools are teaching a whole generation computer language to adjust to the technological needs of a Stage II [post survival-focused] society, we have neglected to teach this generation relationship language and conflict resolution skills to address the social and psychological needs of a Stage II society. And when it is taught, in countries like Germany, although called social competence it focuses on workplace teamwork - still on survival, breadwinner oriented work goals.

  Warren Farrell

  Teamwork, Country, Teaching

  "Father and Child Reunion". Book by Warren Farrell, 2001.

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• I think the prospect of bringing back grammar schools has always been wrong and I've never supported it. And I don't think any Conservative government would have done it.

  David Cameron

  School, Thinking, Government

  "Sunday AM" on BBC, January 15, 2006.

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• I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Hands, Feet, Tunes

  J. M. Coetzee (2017). “In the Heart of the Country: A Novel”, p.10, Penguin

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• I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. ... In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.

  Peter Greenaway

  Stress, Latin, Moments

  Peter Greenaway (1999). “Eight and a half women”, Dis Voir Editions

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• Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

  Edward Sapir

  Expression, Perfect, Would Be

  Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech ch. 2 (1921)

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• I cannot recall a period when I did not draw; and at school, the studies that were distasteful to me, mathematics and grammar , were retarded by the indulgence of teachers who were proud of my drawing faculties, and passed over my neglect of uncongenial subjects.

  Jacob Epstein

  Teacher, School, Drawing

  Jacob Epstein, (2013). “Let There Be Sculpture”, p.10, Read Books Ltd

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• Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Motivational, Writing, Mean

  "Sculpting in Time" by Andrei Tarkovsky, (p. 88), 1986.

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• The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick).

  Robert Hooke

  Art, Practice, Design

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• Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.

  Hannah Arendt

  Vocabulary, Language, Crucial

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• Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

  Robert Frost

  Vocabulary, Discipline, Delight

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• Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.

  Richard Mitchell

  Exercise, Thinking, Mind

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• I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar.

  Maurice Saatchi

  Writing, Way, Punctuation

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• Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

  H. L. Mencken

  Quotation Marks, Next, Chiefs

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “American Language Supplement 2”, p.593, Knopf

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