And don’t confound the language of the nation
With long-tailed words in osity and ation.
--
The Monks and the Giants (published c. 1871), canto i, line 6, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).John Hookham Frere
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Each man is constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.
Alain Finkielkraut
The best part of our misfortunes - our moral unhappiness, I mean - comes from the fact that we have words to describe them... We give them body, we even go so far as to give them a body which is not their own, for the words of common language do not always correspond to our sufferings, which may be of a new and distinct sort. ... And then, too, words prolong and preserve sorrows that should long have been forgotten. Animal nature forgets....
Andre Maurois
Tony the Beat Poet says the words alone, lonely and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language. I agree with Tony. Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.
Don Miller
And He is the God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (I Cor. i. 27) And God is in each of us in the measure in which one feels Him and loves Him. "If of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without sincerity of heart, and the other prays to the an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to the idol, while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires. And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology.
Miguel de Unamuno
Long words, fat talk — they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?
Russell Baker
Frere, John Hookham
Fresnel, Augustin-Jean
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