These Grammar quotes will inspire you. In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers’ or writers’ composition of clauses, phrases, and words.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Grammar quotes, Grammar sayings, and Grammar proverbs.
Best Grammar Quotes
- “Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock.” ~ B. J. Chute
- “Grammar is the analysis of language.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “Grammar is the grave of letters.” ~ Elbert Hubbard
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“Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.” ~ Charlton Laird
- “Grammar is not a set of arbitrary rules; it is a compact between people who wish to understand each other.” ~ Robert Breault
- “The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
- “Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.” ~ Richard Chenevix Trench
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“Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” ~ E. B. White
- “Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.” ~ Moliere
- “Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.” ~ Beryl Bainbridge
- “It’s like learning a language; you can’t speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.” ~ Fred Frith
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“English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.” ~ Bill Bryson
- “I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar.” ~ Robert Breault
- “Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language… the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.” ~ Remy de Gourmont
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“Grammar, which can govern even Kings.” ~ Moliere
- “Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.” ~ Mark Twain
- “At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.” ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- “When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc… I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“I demand that my books be judged with the utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.” ~ Louis Aragon
- “Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.” ~ Oliver Goldsmith
- “The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.” ~ Michel de Montaigne
- “I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” ~ Mark Twain
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“Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.” ~ Jack Lynch
- “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
- “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” ~ Joan Didion
- “I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.” ~ Robert Graves
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“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cut-and-dry grammar, and goahead plot.” ~ James Joyce
- “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
- “I went to the local schools, the local state primary school, and then to the local grammar school. A secondary school, which technically was an independent school, it was not part of the state educational system.” ~ John Hume
- “I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.” ~ Anthony Holden
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“Be able to correctly pronounce the words you would like to speak and have excellent spoken grammar.” ~ Marilyn Vos Savant
- “Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression” ~ Amos Bronson Alcott
- “At age 11 in 1960, I moved to an academic state secondary school, Harrow County Grammar School for Boys.” ~ Paul Nurse
- “Statistics is the grammar of science.” ~ Karl Pearson
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“Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaningfully and clearly but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.” ~ William Cobbett
- “I studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine.” ~ Karl von Frisch
- “It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
- “Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.” ~ Octavio Paz
- “Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.” ~ William Safire
- “Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.” ~ Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
- “The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.” ~ Ferdinand de Saussure
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“There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women’s stories. God, the BBC’s practically run by women.” ~ Julie Walters
- “As a former high school teacher and a student in a class of 60 urchins at St. Brigid’s grammar school, I know that education is all about discipline and motivation. Disadvantaged students need extra attention, a stable school environment, and enough teacher creativity to stimulate their imaginations. Those things are not expensive.” ~ Bill O’Reilly
- “Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.” ~ Joan Didion
- “When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.” ~ Raymond Chandler
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“Mathematics is as little a science as grammar is a language.” ~ Ernst Mayr
- “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
- “A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
- “Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.” ~ Mark Twain
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“After all, when a thought takes one’s breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.” ~ Thomas Wentworth Higginson
- “Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.” ~ Robert Graves
- “Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’am’s than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.” ~ Robert Frost
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“I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.” ~ Carl Sandburg
- “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin – a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn’t, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans.” ~ Bill Bryson , English grammar quotes
- “I used to go with him and I’d sometimes play, take over from him. That was my first taste of the music business, I suppose, but I was also in the youth orchestra at Johnston Grammar.” ~ Trevor Horn
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“Everything bows to success, even grammar.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.” ~ William Labov
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“Greek was very much alive language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.” ~ Gilbert Murray
- “I was part of the first generation of girls and women to be educated and go to grammar school even if we didn’t have much money. Then that generation went, ‘OK, great’, and went into medicine or the police, and hit this wall of discrimination from older men who hadn’t caught up.” ~ Helen Mirren
- “In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.” ~ Ferdinand de Saussure
