An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON GRAMMAR
No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
Isaac Babel (1894-1941, Jewish writer)
From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965, British statesman, Prime Minister)
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
Joan Didion (1934-, American essayist)
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940, American writer) Author's website: www.fitzgeraldsociety.org
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
Robert Frost (1875-1963, American poet)
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
Grammar is the grave of letters.
Elbert Hubbard (1859-1915, American author, publisher)
Grammar, which can govern even Kings.
Jean Baptiste Moliere (1622-1673, French playwright)
The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845, American poet, critic, short-story writer)
I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967, American poet)
Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
Lewis Thomas (1913-1993, American physician, educator)
When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)
From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. "After dinner, the men moved into the living room." I explained to the professor that this was Rose' way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.
James Thurber (1894-1961, American humorist, illustrator)
Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, Austrian philosopher)
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985, American author, editor)
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