LANGUAGE QUOTES IV

quotations about language

Language quote

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

KARL MARX

The German Ideology

Tags: Karl Marx


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


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

Tags: Gao Xingjian


In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?

PABLO NERUDA

The Book of Questions

Tags: Pablo Neruda


Speech is the best show a man puts on.

BENJAMIN LEE WHORF

Language, Thought and Reality


We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays


Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

HAROLD PINTER

Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 2005

Tags: Harold Pinter


Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee; it springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech.

BEN JONSON

Timber: Or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter

Tags: Ben Jonson


Language is considered by some to be the distinguishing characteristic of humanity. No other animal is capable of the kind of linguistic complexity in sound, grammar, and meaning as humans. With well over one million words in the English language alone, this makes the range of our possible expression incalculably large. Many of the sentences you compose in your day-to-day conversations may never have been said before. Ever.

NICOLA BROWN

"How Language Complexity Invalidates a Formulaic Content Approach", Skyword, April 1, 2016


We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

ELLEN GILCHRIST

Falling Through Space

Tags: Ellen Gilchrist


By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

JEAN GENET

The Blacks

Tags: Jean Genet


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

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


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


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

Tags: Arthur Adamov


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

CONFUCIUS

The Analects

Tags: Confucius


Language is an art, and a glorious one, whose influence extends over all others, and in which all science whatever must center; but an art springing from necessity, and originally invented by artless men.

J. H. TOOKE

attributed, Day's Collacon


Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

ROLAND BARTHES

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Tags: Roland Barthes


The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

Essays

Tags: Oliver Goldsmith


If the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now -- well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.

MAX VENTILLA

"Learn Different: Silicon Valley disrupts education", The New Yorker, March 7, 2016


If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

DOUG LARSON

attributed, If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People?

Tags: Doug Larson