LANGUAGE QUOTES IV
quotations about language
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A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
MARCEL PROUST
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Within a Budding Grove
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Perhaps the sad and empty language that today's flabby humanity pours forth, will, in all its horror, in all its boundless absurdity, re-echo in the heart of a solitary man who is awake, and then perhaps that man, suddenly realizing that he does not understand, will begin to understand.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
The Confession
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A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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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
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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
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All true language is incomprehensible, Like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Ci-Git
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The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.
GAO XINGJIAN
"An Interview with Gao Xingjian", BookBrowse
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Language is a virus from outer space.
WILLIAM DUCKWORTH
Twenty/Twenty
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Language is the sole instrument through which all life's activities are performed. Language is therefore not merely a picture of reality per se but also a willing instrument of the language-user to map the reality.
R. C. PRADHAN
Language, Reality, and Transcendence: An Essay on the Main Strands of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy
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Speech is the best show a man puts on.
BENJAMIN LEE WHORF
Language, Thought and Reality
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We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Falling Through Space
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The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.
STEPHEN FRY
A Bit of Fry and Laurie
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A language has very little that is arbitrary in it, very little betokening the conscious power and action of man. It owes its origin, not to the thoughts and the will of individuals, but to an instinct actuating a whole people: it expresses what is common to them all: it has sprung out of their universal wants, and lives in their hearts. But after a while in intellectual aristocracy come forward, and frame a new language of their own. The princes and lords of thought shoot forth their winged words into regions beyond the scan of the people. They require a gold coinage, in addition to the common currency.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
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The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Essays
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Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.
EDWARD HIRSCH
How to Read a Poem
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An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
MARTIN BUBER
I and Thou
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Language is a living original; it is not made but grows. The growth of language repeats the growth of the plant; at first it is only root, next it puts forth a stem, then leaves, and finally blossoms.
WILLIAM SWINTON
Rambles Among Words: Their Poetry, History and Wisdom
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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET
The Blacks
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Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
MURIEL BARBERY
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
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