LANGUAGE QUOTES
quotations about language
The more deeply language is probed, the more traces it reveals of the beings that produce it.
MICHAEL LEVIN
Feminism and Freedom
For language is to so great an extent the condition and limit of thought, men are so little accustomed, indeed so little able, to meditate on things, except through the intervention, and by the machinery, of words, that nothing short of this would bring them to a sense of the actual existence of any such wants. And it is, I may observe, one of the advantages of acquaintance with another language besides our own, and of the institution which will follow, if we have learned that other to any purpose, of these comparisons, that we thus come to be aware that names are not, and least of all the names which any single language possesses, coextensive with things ... that a multitude of things exist which, tho capable of being resumed in a word, are yet without one, unnamed and unregistered; so that, vast as is the world of names, the world of realities is even vaster still.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
On the Study of Words
The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
Eugene Aram
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
GEORGE ORWELL
The Lion and the Unicorn
Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.
APHRA BEHN
The Rover
The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they werent there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
"The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?", Nautilus, April 20, 2017
High thoughts must have high language.
ARISTOPHANES
The Frogs
The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Intellect", Essays
It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
So we see, in languages, the tongue is more pliant to all expressions and sounds, the joints are more supple, to all feats of activity and motions, in youth than afterwards. For it is true, that late learners cannot so well take the ply; except it be in some minds, that have not suffered themselves to fix, but have kept themselves open, and prepared to receive continual amendment, which is exceeding rare.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Custom And Education", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality -- to distort what happens -- because we fear it?
HAROLD PINTER
"Oh, Superman", Opinion, May 31, 1990
I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Talk to Me
Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!
EDDIE IZZARD
Definite Article
The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of speech, consisting of names or apellations, and their connections; whereby men register their thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
Alphabet: a symbolic system used in algebra, with applications that have yet to be discovered by dyslexics and two thirds of college graduates.
BAUVARD
Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
I remember reading once that some fellows use language to conceal thought; but it's been my experience that a good many more use it instead of thought.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
The learned languages are indispensable to form the gentleman and the scholar, and are well worth all the labor that they have cost us, provided they are valued not for themselves alone, which would make a pedant, but as a foundation for further acquirements.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words
Every new language we speak opens new possibilities.
ALI ANTHONY BELL
"Why the English Language Is Vital for the Future of Morocco", Morocco World News, March 21, 2016
Babies exposed to multiple languages during their first few months retain the ability to recognise sounds from all the languages they hear.
ULRIKE LEMMIN-WOOLFREY
"Language learning: it really is harder to teach old dogs new tricks", Telegraph, March 31, 2016
To possess another language is to possess another soul.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy