Grammar Quotes - Page 8

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Use, Nouns, Facts

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt McLaughlin (2010). “The Laws of Nature: Excerpts from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.75, North Atlantic Books

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The word "mathematics" is a Greek word and, by origin, it means "something that has been learned or understood," or perhaps "acquired knowledge," or perhaps even, somewhat against grammar, "acquirable knowledge," that is, "learnable knowledge," that is, "knowledge acquirable by learning."

Salomon Bochner

Knowledge, Mean, Science

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My whole life as a grammar-school boy, getting to Cambridge University and working on the 'London Sunday Times' has been very aspirational.

Robert Lacey

School, Sunday, Boys

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My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

Kate Atkinson

Father, School, Class

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Mr Robert Montgomery's genius [is] far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax? [His] readers must take such grammar as they can get and be thankful.

Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild

Being Thankful, Syntax, Genius

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when Christian theology becomes traditionalism and men fail to hold and use it as they do a living language, it becomes an obstacle, not a help to religious conviction. To the greatest of the early Fathers and the great scholastics theology was a language which, like all language, had a grammar and a vocabulary from the past, but which they used to express all the knowledge and experience of their own time as well.

Lily Dougall

Christian, Religious, Father

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When your last breath arrives, Grammar can do nothing.

Adi Shankara

Lasts, Breaths, Can Do

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People from my sort of background needed Grammar schools to compete with children from privileged homes like Shirley Williams and Anthony Wedgwood Benn.

Margaret Thatcher

Children, Home, School

"Confrontation with reality". Margaret Thatcher's speech to the Conservative Party Conference at Winter Gardens, Blackpool, www.margaretthatcher.org. October 14, 1977.

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The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one

Stephen King

Hard Work, Writing, Dedication

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Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America.

Dave Barry

Painful Death, America, Causes

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Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

Dave Barry

War, United States, World

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Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

Colum McCann

Art, Recovery, Joy

"Author, author: Stories are there to be told" by Colum McCann, www.theguardian.com. September 4, 2009.

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Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.

Janet Burroway

Girl, Fall, Musical

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In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

Nancy Mairs

Female

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I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education, Lying, Book

Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Essays and English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.14, Cosimo, Inc.

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Languages are fluffy big pillows stuffed between nations - what others say is muffled and nearly lost in them, and when we speak their grammar we get feathers in our mouth. It's worth it. What pleasure to phrase an idea, even in child's words, slowly, and sail it across the gulf in another language to a different-speaking human being!

Richard Bach

Children, Ideas, Different

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scales are the grammar of music.

Frances Parkinson Keyes

Music, Scales

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Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.

Don Paterson

Art, Rely Upon, Poetry

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I am not afraid of death threats, but I am appalled that so many people are capable of so much wrong spelling and fractured grammar!

Miriam

People, Spelling, Threat

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I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said, "This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me."

George Carlin

Believe, School, Thinking

"The New York Times", August 20, 1995.

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[on going to Sunday school:] It looks like rain, and I hope it will rain cats and dogs and hammers and pitchforks and silver sugar spoons and hay ricks and paper-covered novels and picture frames and rag carpets and toothpicks and skating rinks and birds of paradise and roof gardens and burdocks and French grammars before Sunday school time.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Dog, Rain, School

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It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer's iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Strong, Latin, Sunday

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1911). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.21, Рипол Классик

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Let your letter be written as accurately as you are able,--I mean with regard to language, grammar, and stops; for as to the matter of it the less trouble you give yourself the better it will be. Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.

Lord Chesterfield

Mean, Giving, Matter

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Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Purity, Individual, Precision

Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.265, Harvard University Press

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To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Writing, Erosion, Language

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