LANGUAGE QUOTES V

quotations about language

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

JOHN DRYDEN

Works of John Dryden

Tags: John Dryden


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


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

JEAN GENET

The Blacks

Tags: Jean Genet


Language, which is the uniting bond and very medium of communion between men, is at the same time by the great variety of tongues, the means of severing and estranging nations more than anything else.

HORACE SMITH

The Tin Trumpet: Or, Heads and Tails, for the Wise and Waggish


For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

STEPHEN HAWKING

British Telecom advertisement, 1993

Tags: Stephen Hawking


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


Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

GENE WOLFE

"The Death of Doctor Island", Universe 3

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There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

The Shadow of the Wind

Tags: Carlos Ruiz Zafon


None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Madame Bovary


Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Madame Bovary

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Language was not given to man: he seized it.

LOUIS ARAGON

Le Libertinage

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To clothe low-creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy but flat foolery; it rather loads than raises a wren, to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.

THOMAS FULLER

The Holy State and the Profane State

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Language is originally and essentially nothing but a system of signs or symbols, which denote real occurrences, or their echo in the human soul.

CARL JUNG

Psychology of the Unconscious

Tags: Carl Jung


In the last century researchers and pedagogues viewed children learning a second language as an impediment to learning. The resultant pedagogical philosophy delayed the introduction of "foreign" languages to the high school years, just in time for the real impediment to focused learning -- adolescence.

JAY KUTEN

"Language is food for the brain", Wanganui Chronicle, March 16, 2016


Men are apt to overvalue the tongues, and to think they have made considerable progress in learning when they have once overcome these; yet in reality there is no internal worth in them, and men may understand a thousand languages without being the wiser.

E. D. BAKER

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

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Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art.

E. L. JAMES

Fifty Shades of Grey

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Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

MARK HOPKINS

address at dedication of Williston Seminary, Dec. 1, 1841


Language is not a wonderful natural asset; it is an artificial device that constantly misleads us and does us great harm; and the modern way of studying language is itself harmful because it enhances the reputation of language and sustains corrupt ways of thought.

AMOREY GETHIN

introduction, Language and Thought: A Rational Enquiry Into Their Nature and Relationship


A man reacheth not to excellence with one language.

R. ASCHAM

attributed, Day's Collacon