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Language Quotes

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. P...

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How is it that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. P...

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[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often gi...

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Picture of Francine Prose
Francine ProseReading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. A...

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Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunde...

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Picture of Frantz Fanon
Frantz FanonThe Wretched of the Earth

It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and...

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Picture of Frantz Fanon
Frantz FanonThe Wretched of the Earth

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectiona...

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Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ult...

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Picture of Franz Rosenzweig
Franz RosenzweigFranz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought

A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above al...

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What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum ...

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Language as putative science. - The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in th...

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We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its sp...

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Friedrich NietzscheOn the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical id...

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Goal: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in ou...

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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, al...

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To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in...

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A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen whic...

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Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make sn...

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No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the ...

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I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown ...

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I know your head aches. I know you're tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher's wi...

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A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to l...

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HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be q...

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HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any En...

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By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I...

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Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good dige...

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When I learn the meaning of a word, I know the word; but when I say to myself, 'I know the word,' th...

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Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an ...

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But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctions away. More exactly, it is ...

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The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thi...

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Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall ...

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The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like...

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Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phr...

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What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In pro...

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But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctionsaway. More exactly, it is n...

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I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I ...

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Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the ...

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Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays hersel...

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when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it ...

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Picture of George Steiner
George SteinerLanguage & Silence: Essays on Language

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation...

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The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'conden...

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Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and ...

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The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from co...

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Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, ...

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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to ill...

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Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journ...

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Picture of Grace Paley
Grace PaleyEnormous Changes at the Last Minute

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is '...

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You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd yo...

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In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ...

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What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

Picture of Gustave Flaubert
Gustave FlaubertFlaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we ...

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I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I p...

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Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lip...

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He liked to address every man in his own language, as a good European should.

Picture of H. G. Wells
H. G. WellsMeanwhile or the Picture of a Lady

All we can do is to prepare for a universal language that will go on changing for ever. We don’t kno...

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There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portug...

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The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in t...

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That means that every human being - without distinction of sex, age, race, skin color, language, rel...

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One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and re...

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We're on the border of this world, speaking a common language. That's all.

Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiKafka on the Shore

Language is very tough, though, a tenacity that is backed up by a long history. However it is treate...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiWind/Pinball: Two Novels

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the w...

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Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, an...

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The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" a...

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The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more uni...

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A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious o...

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There is one thing I like about the Poles—their language. Polish, when it is spoken by intelligent p...

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Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language;While we are speaking the word, it is is...

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Picture of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowThe Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and splu...

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Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nat...

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The tongue of man is a twisty thing.

Many terms which have now dropped out of favour will be revived and those that are at present respe...

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Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. Y...

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In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise...

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Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accur...

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All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will imp...

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Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty...

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Picture of Italo Calvino
Italo CalvinoSix Memos For The Next Millennium

The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or...

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Picture of Italo Calvino
Italo CalvinoSix Memos For The Next Millennium

I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that languag...

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Picture of Italo Calvino
Italo CalvinoSix Memos For The Next Millennium

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of ...

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Picture of Italo Calvino
Italo CalvinoSix Memos For The Next Millennium

We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which former...

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Picture of Ivan Illich
Ivan IllichThe Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies

Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can und...

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