“French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.”

It is very difficult to generalise. Everyone’s adventure is original.

People who do not speak our language very well do complain of feeling rebuffed by French people, who can sometimes be impatient, or even intolerant.

They place great stress on the clarity of our language for expressing nuances and showing subtleties.

All the English speakers, or almost all, have difficulties with the gender of words.

The more English is heard in the world, the more gratifying it seems to speak French, and above all to know the culture of our country. They find a kind of French social grace in the language and culture.

I know how to say ‘no’ in twelve languages. That’s enough for a woman.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the ’60s: Independent fire!

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Symptoms are the body’s mother tongue; signs are in a foreign language.

Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables.