Language Quotes

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.

~ John Steinbeck

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

~ Slavoj Žižek

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality, those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

~ Gilles Deleuze

Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology… we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

~ Slavoj Žižek

In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

Freedom, one of the most important words in any language.

~ Anwar Akash

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

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

~ Stephen Fry

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

~ Jane Wagner

They say that maths is a language. So how do I order a pizza with extra cheese in maths?

~ Greg Curtis

Lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas (technical warrant officer trainee specialised in aircraft jet engines)

~ Tarja Moles

The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.

~ G.k. Chesterton

As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot - it's the Bill Maher of punctuation.

~ June Casagrande

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.

~ Dan Quayle

How many words are you having trouble with, sir?Just the ones that I've highlighted.I count at least a dozen, and I haven't gotten out of the first paragraph.That's as far as I got, too. I'm not sure you and I speak the same language.

~ Howard Tayler

I also think pronunciation of a foreign tongue could be better taught than by demanding from the pupil those internal acrobatic feats that are generally impossible and always useless. This is the sort of instruction one receives: 'Press your tonsils against the underside of your larynx. Then with the convex part of the septum curved upwards so as almost but not quite to touch the uvula try with the tip of your tongue to reach your thyroid. Take a deep breath and compress your glottis. Now without opening your lips say Garoo.' And when you have done it they are not satisfied.

~ Jerome K. Jerome

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

~ Gore Vidal

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

~ George Orwell

Rigorously comb through the pages of your life until you can even speak its broken dialects fluently.

~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

The language we use is extremely powerful. It is the frame through which we perceive and describe ourselves and our picture of the world.

~ Iben Dissing Sandahl

So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.

~ N.h. Kleinbaum

Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Sometimes, in rare occasions, when I see a man respects a woman, treats her like another valuable human being, uses a proper language when talking to her and does not consider her only as a sex-toy. I feel proud of being a man. I feel grateful of belonging to a gender category as he is. However, the feeling is soon gone after seeing how men in general talk about women, disrespect them and insult them any way they can.

~ Kambiz Shabankare

My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown.

~ Aliya Whiteley

It seems that in almost all societies, the attitudes that people have to language change is basically the same. People everywhere tend to say that the older form of a language is in some sense 'better' than the form that is being used today.

~ Terry Crowley

There is a love for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know and I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word cunt five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.

~ Patricia Lockwood

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

~ Aldo Leopold

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

~ Elizabeth Kostova

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.

~ John Burnside

Talented writers etched the story detailing the travails of broken souls numerous times. The poets recounted an equal amount of times the lucent tears of human laughter and weeping sorrow. Everyone understands bitterness and joy. Conversely, the most evocative aspects of human beings, the bewildering clarification of their ambiguous natures, are virtually indefinable and therefore unutterable. Written testaments to love, truth, beauty, and adoration of nature are inherently weak because words fail to convey what a person experiences inside the spaces that compose their chemical field.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We have our own language. Christianese... We don't say 'He's out of his mind,' no, we say 'That's our youth pastor.

~ Tim Hawkins

When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about how welcome and safe I am what the expectations are and where to find food. Buddhist words come from another dialect from the people over the mountain. I've become pretty fluent in Buddhist it helps me to see my home country differently but it will never be speech I can feel completely at home in.

~ Mary Rose O'reilley

The faithful have no dread of using the traditional language of the church. Terms like incarnation and resurrection need to be explained, not avoided.

~ Thomas C. Oden

God created places and things in the Old Testament to teach us about Jesus in the New Testament. These pictures are so simple, even a child can understand them. God graciously babbled at us so we can learn complex truths.

~ Todd Friel

Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

~ J.m. Coetzee

When the heart is down and the soul is heavy, the eyes can only speak the language of tears

~ Ikechukwu Izuakor