Language Quotes

Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thi...

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and oft...

I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested in.

To generalize is to be an idiot," said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a ...

The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our ...

I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it eno...

She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope...

Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, ...

No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions - so we c...

But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were a...

Human spoken language seems to beadventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other function...

Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, ...

I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if al...

Our difficulties in understanding or effectuatingcommunication with other animals may arise from our...

Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.

The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no re...

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of lite...

The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the pheno...

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for k...

Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pr...

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of i...

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

that your power of commandwith simple language wasone of the magnificent things ofour century.(from ...

It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If...

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to h...

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls ...

In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-cl...

Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in makin...

...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in...

If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the...

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how...

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

What is at work in this report is the reduction of language to code. Cliches, coined by the state, b...

To me the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe comfortable middle-of-the road policy. Above all o...

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of o...

As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phr...

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This str...

A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who empl...

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The ...

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstru...

We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forg...

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matt...

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it...

Since God doesn't have a name, I'll give him the name of Simptar. It doesn't come from any language....

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not ...

Language is insight itself.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.

Hey dawg, wassup?" he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an at...

Language is the only homeland.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in ...

So he was always in the town at one place or another, drinking, knocking about with the men he knew....

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Rel...

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin ...

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lac...

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everythi...

I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so...

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of...

The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, m...

I can ask for cigarettes in every language

The species greatest harvest ― words.

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within ...

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the diale...

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating...

More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, ...

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to eng...

It's only words... unless they're true.

Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just a...

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of lang...

London is a language. I guess all places are.

Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.

On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From ...

What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyo...

Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop cler...

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an ...

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's ...

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and s...

The two most beautiful words in the English language are "cheque enclosed".

The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm resurrection is a leap int...

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the ...

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful la...

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, i...

He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place wher...

I wanted to say a certain thing to a certain man, a certain true thing that had crept into my head. ...

The aim of interpretation is not agreement but understanding

They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up ...

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfam...

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when ...