Language Quotes

The language of the heartIs the only languageThat everybody can understand.

A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. T...

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that ...

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and ...

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and sillin...

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complime...

I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and t...

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphr...

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame ...

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, v...

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught ...

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes ...

...it was another year or two before I discovered that drat and draft were different words. During t...

Soft words are hard arguments.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learn...

When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oeno...

What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in whi...

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we ...

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum,...

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn ...

And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fid...

The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. S...

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate....

As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on...

I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.

Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscore...

I see music as one language. If one musical form eats its own tail, it dies. So it needs to be a mon...

I want a language that speaks the truth.

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women ...

Music is a language, you see, a universal language.

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it....

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c...

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably but they signify qui...

If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too...

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what'...

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course ...

[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits...

Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly syn...

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a lang...

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and wi...

Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional clos...

Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those...

I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms...

The alternative is to locate large deposits of specifically what we need, and extract it in bulk fro...

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fight...

Soft words are hard arguments.

Soft words are hard arguments.

Soft words are hard arguments.

Dialect words - those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Soft words are hard arguments.

Soft words are hard arguments.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is...

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own be...

Every man who knows anything of languages, knows that it is impossible to translate from one languag...

The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the l...

That which is now called learning, was not learning originally. Learning does not consist, as the sc...

We have our own language. Christianese... We don't say 'He's out of his mind,' no, we say 'That's ou...

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?

Well,' said Can o' Beans, a bit hesitantly,' imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental i...

What appeals to me? There are things, points of view, uses of the language, habits of dress, ways of...

Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. S...

He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a differ...

When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and ...

Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head....

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feeling...

Translation is the art of failure.

If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their ...

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. ...

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother ...

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words eve...

We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You se...

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly ...

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the lan...

There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contai...

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's t...

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feelin...

It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines a...

But language is wine upon his lips

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in th...

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are oft...

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like ...

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imag...

One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least...

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned or of dictionary-makers but is something a...

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of...

Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form a...

Languages are not strangers to on another.

It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.

As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. T...