Linguistic Beauty Quotes

If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.

To be blunt, I feel like lyricism in Spanish is of a different quality than English. You can get really poetic in Spanish, but I feel like if you do that in English, you risk sounding cheesy. In Spanish, it's never that. It's always this deep, passionate, beautiful imagery; it's painted different, a different color.

There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.

The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

I kind of always struggled writing in Malay, because Malay is such a beautiful language. And it gets really hard, you know, if you want to make it into a song. You have to make it sound beautiful, use the right words.

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)

Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.

There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.

Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.

You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman: she is either beautiful or faithful.

Mere elegance of language can produce at best but an empty renown.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

What beauty there is in words; what a lurking curious charm in the sound some words.

I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.

When I write, I want something to sound good itself.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.