Quote Tag

You know how much I am inclined to explain all disputes among philosophical schools as merely verbal disputes or at least to derive them originally from verbal disputes.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

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.

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.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

They certainly give very strange names to diseases.

Syllables govern the world.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

When we say that Philosophy tries to clear up the meanings of concepts we do not mean that it is simply concerned to substitute some long phrase for some familiar word.