38 Grammar Quotes To Inspire

Grammar, often considered the foundation of effective communication, transcends beyond just a set of rules. It shapes our thoughts, influences the clarity of our interactions, and adds elegance to our language. In the pursuit of mastering grammar, we sometimes need a touch of inspiration to keep us motivated and engaged. To that end, we've curated a collection of the top 38 grammar quotes, each one crafted to inspire, educate, and entertain. Whether you're a seasoned writer, a student, or simply someone who appreciates the beauty of language, these quotes will remind you of the power and art of well-constructed sentences.

1. “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.” - Winston S. Churchill

2. “Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.” - Mark Twain

3. “What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.” - Terry Jones

4. “I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.” - David Ogilvy

5. “It never ceases to amaze me how prosaic, pedestrian, unimaginative people can persistently pontificate about classical grammatical structure as though it's fucking rocket science. These must be the same people who hate Picasso, because he couldn't keep the paint inside the lines and the colors never matched the numbers.” - Abbe Diaz

6. “Take what the British call the "greengrocer's apostrophe," named for aberrant signs advertising cauliflower's or carrot's in local fruit and vegetable shops.” - Naomi S. Baron

7. “His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action. ” - Jennifer Crusie

8. “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” - Dorothy Parker

9. “A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.” - Ben Marcus

10. “We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time.” - Stephen W. Hawking

11. “In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.” - Rabindranath Tagore

12. “Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.” - Jerry Spinelli

13. “Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.” - Douglas Coupland

14. “This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank.” - Christopher Moore

15. “The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.” - Michel de Montaigne

16. “I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never "the hoi polloi," because hoi meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say.” - Anne Fadiman

17. “Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail.” - Kitty Burns Florey

18. “Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.” - Vera Nazarian

19. “[M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don't say but however. These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however.” - Stefano Benni

20. “Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...” - Jack Kerouac

21. “In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else.” - David Foster Wallace

22. “I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

23. “This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.” - Winston S. Churchill

24. “A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.” - Winston S. Churchill

25. “Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of "1" for the second "h" in the word "hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the freak itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower; and Cynthia, a much more perverse amateur of misshapen or illicitly connected words, puns, logogriphs, and so on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest that in the light of the example she cited struck me as statistically insane. ("The Vane Sisters")” - Vladimir Nabokov

26. “Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.” - Jasper Fforde

27. “We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.” - Peter Sloterdijk

28. “That Grace looked annoyed at me."I didn't say you would go to jail, Junie B.," she said. "I just wish you would say the word correctly, that's all.” - Barbara Park

29. “I don't think anyone would think that an ellipsis represents doubt or anything. I think it's more, you know, hinting at the future. What lies ahead.” - Sarah Dessen

30. “I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!” - Roman Payne

31. “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” - Joan Didion

32. “In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.” - Henry Miller

33. “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” - James D. Nicoll

34. “The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.” - Jonathan Culver

35. “Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.” - Laura Kreitzer

36. “Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!” - Roald Dahl

37. “Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.” - Red Red Rover

38. “والتعريف في "ال" العهدية حقيقي لفظاً ومعنىً، وفي "ال" الجنسية لفظي فقط فما دخلت عليه معرفة لفظاً نكرة معنى، ولذا كانت الجملة بعد المعرفة بـ "ال" العهدية حالية دائماً لأن صاحبها معرفة محضة، والجملة بعد المعرف بـ "ال" الجنسية يجوز أن تكون حالاً مراعاة للفظ وأن تكون صفة مراعاة للمعنى.” - سعيد الأفغاني