Edmund Burke Quotes

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.

I have learnt to appreciate the clarity of English language.

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

To reason with poorly chosen words is like using a pair of scales with inaccurate weights.

The more words you have at your disposal, the more precisely you can express yourself.

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

Liquid, flowing words are the choicest and the best, if language is regarded as music. But when it is considered as a picture, then there are rough words which are very telling, they make their mark.

As a flower that is lovely and beautiful, but is scentless, even so fruitless is the well-spoken word of one who practices it not.

We oftener say things because we can say them well, than because they are sound and reasonable.

I am such a person of words. I've spent so much of my life trying to get it right, say it right, say it eloquently, say it truthfully, say it honestly, that when I hear it said in ways that none of those adverbs would describe I find myself so repelled that it almost shuts my mind off.

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.