LANGUAGE QUOTES III
quotations about language
Language is the source of misunderstandings.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
attributed, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Quotes for All Occasions
Learning a language is the making of shared semantic agreements with others.
PHIL BAINES & ANDREW HASLAM
Type and Typography
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
The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step.
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
Language
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
This is the strange contract between life and language: language keeps naming and life, like a woman seductively escaping her seducer's caress, keeps just a little beyond its names.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
He has strangled
His language in his tears.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry VIII
One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds: Selections from the Writings of the Most Celebrated Authors from the Earliest to the Present Time
Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language.
NOAH WEBSTER
preface, Dictionary
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
GEORGE ORWELL
The English People
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
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
CONFUCIUS
The Analects
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
PABLO NERUDA
The Book of Questions
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
A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
It is a silly conceit, that men without languages are often without understanding; it is apparent in all ages, that some such have been even prodigies for ability; for it is not to be believed that wisdom speaks only to her disciples in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
THOMAS FULLER
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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