LANGUAGE QUOTES III

quotations about language

Language quote

He has strangled
His language in his tears.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Henry VIII

Tags: William Shakespeare


At the end of the day, good language is bold language.

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE

"Pamela Love and Francesco Clemente Reflect on Decades of Collaboration", Vogue, April 4, 2016


As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

GORE VIDAL

Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia

Tags: Gore Vidal


An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

MARTIN BUBER

I and Thou

Tags: Martin Buber


Language is the source of misunderstandings.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY

attributed, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Quotes for All Occasions

Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupery


The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Morning Yet on Creation Day

Tags: Chinua Achebe


Language is the sole instrument through which all life's activities are performed. Language is therefore not merely a picture of reality per se but also a willing instrument of the language-user to map the reality.

R. C. PRADHAN

Language, Reality, and Transcendence: An Essay on the Main Strands of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy


It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one.

ARTHUR HELPS

Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd

Tags: Arthur Helps


Consider: you're inventing language and you come on an object for the first time, so you name it 'tree.' Then you go on and you find another object. You have the choice of calling it tree-only-with-special-properties, such as squat, hard, gray, leafless, and branchless, for instance -- or you can name it a completely different object, say: 'rock.' And then the next object you encounter you may decide is a 'big rock,' or a 'boulder,' or a 'bush,' or 'a small, squat tree,' and so on. Now two languages will not only have different words for the same things, but they will end up having divided those same things up into categories and properties along completely different lines. And that division, as much or more than the different words themselves, will naturally mold all the thinking of the people who use that language.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

Neveryon

Tags: Samuel R. Delany


The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step.

LEONARD BLOOMFIELD

Language


The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

"On Language", The American Democrat

Tags: James Fenimore Cooper


Language is easy for us to learn and use because language, like a living organism, has evolved in a symbiotic relationship with humans. Language has adapted to what our brains can do, rather than the other way around.

LINDA B. GLASER

"New book reintegrates the science of language", Cornell Chronicle, April 4, 2016


Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

KARL MARX

The German Ideology

Tags: Karl Marx


Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

MURIEL BARBERY

The Elegance of the Hedgehog


Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

GEORGE ORWELL

The English People


The sole constitutional office of language being to express our ideas and sentiments, it becomes more and more perfect and useful, the more effectually it subserves this sole end of its creation.

ORSON SQUIRE FOWLER

Memory and Intellectual Improvement


Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other.

PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE

Letters Written by the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son

Tags: Philip Dormer Stanhope


A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

JOHN DRYDEN

Works of John Dryden

Tags: John Dryden


Language is a virus from outer space.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH

Twenty/Twenty