Language Quotes

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

please don't cook me, kind sirs! I am a good cook myself, and cook better than I cook, if you see wh...

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in whi...

Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together throu...

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and mo...

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of...

As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry...

Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it sh...

It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a...

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of l...

Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is r...

Now and again he spoke to those that served him and thanked them in their own language. They smiled ...

My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. ...

"Plain English" - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us beli...

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is...

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in m...

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends a...

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept ...

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Roy...

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CH...

Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.

The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflati...

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewit...

It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's...

It was impossible to quarrel with words, whose tremulous inequality showed indisposition so plainly.

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world'...

I think it's important and I think it's true that our life experience is going to be about our attit...

Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the wor...

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagin...

A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of...

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something ...

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I ta...

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jea...

Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of...

It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important ...

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness whe...

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a lan...

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those thi...

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silen...

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, med...

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those thi...

I also think pronunciation of a foreign tongue could be better taught than by demanding from the pup...

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya A...

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and...

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last...

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan t...

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revol...

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a count...

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose ...

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, ...

I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the othe...

Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages...

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. ...

A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral funct...

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to t...

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation kno...

You have to fall in love with hanging around words.

Language has not the power to speak what love inditesThe soul lies buried in the Ink that writes

More than kisses letters mingle souls.

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and...

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past...

We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but cr...

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.