Language Quotes

A teacher of mine once said there are no true synonyms.

~ Roy Peter Clark

Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you.

~ J.c. Ryle

Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.

~ Ben Jonson

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

~ Joseph Conrad

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters

~ Pema Chödrön

More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.

~ David Grossman

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.

~ Italo Calvino

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Words can't save you, but they can give you courage.

~ Marty Rubin

No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need.

~ Simon Winchester

I like the sounds of words. Words are very enjoyable. I like words because they are... seductive. And I like words because they can contain... fantasies.

~ James Lusarde

His voice was like soothing melted chocolate. I wanted him to ooze his lovely voice all over my naked body.

~ James Lusarde

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.

~ Donald Harington

Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was…) and a future (there shall be…). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: “Defunctus adhuc loquitur” (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth.

~ Rob Riemen

In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have—the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.

~ Jonathan Stalling

... but I love language. It is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and language has power. Whether in a song lyric, a poem, a speech, or a simple conversation, we’ve all experienced words that resonate with us. They may make us recall a powerful moment, inspire us, move us, or perhaps, comfort us…. But at the same time, we don’t think in words. We think in pictures. If I say the word ‘dog’ to you, you aren’t picturing the letters, d-o-g, you’re picturing a dog from your memory...

~ Lily Velden

I wish I didn’t need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.

~ Henry Sweet

What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm.' The smell of fire taht meant 'Flee.' The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things?And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

~ Amy Tan

There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.

~ Samuel Beckett

I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.

~ William Giraldi

From time to time I try to imagine this world of which he spoke--a culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, in which words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart; a society in which words are holy, and the challenge of life is based upon the quest for gentle words, holy words, gentle truths, holy truths.I try to imagine for myself a world in which the words one gives one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's words carefully, like precious gifts, like magnificent gifts, like magnificent inheritances, for they convey an excess of what we have imagined, they bear gifts beyond imagination, they reveal and revisit the wealth of history.How carefully, how slowly, and how lovingly we might step into our expectations of each other in such a world.

~ Patricia J. Williams

Each word's evocative value or virtue, its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating visions, becomes a treasure to revel in. Besides this hold on affection a word may well have about it the glamorous prestige of high adventures in great company. Think of that the plain word dust calls to mind. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was. Dust hath closed Helen's eye. All follow this and come to dust. The way to dusty death. So, to the lover of words, each word may be not a precious stone only, but one that has shone on Solomon's temple or in Cleopatra's hair.

~ C.e. Montague

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.

~ Antony Sher

The face of self-pity was universally understood.

~ Vann Chow

Silence might be a shout for the truth. It might be the speech that someday, in its truest, most uncontaminated, unadulterated state, all will be revealed.

~ Criss Jami

Music is the sweetest language for hearts, kindest prayer for souls, peaceful breeze for minds, and a magical sail for imaginations.

~ Debasish Mridha

Language is still separating us even though technology is bringing us closer together.

~ Suzy Kassem

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

~ Ferdinand De Saussure

Latin is a dead tongue And Romans made songs! Then no one disagree: It delighted them in theory Now it's the Latin in me.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

I think it's fair to say that I don't pick up languages. If anything, I roll around in them gracelessly and pray that something sticks.

~ Elizabeth Little

He had existed for a long time and was fluent in many languages - most of them…dead ones.

~ Alan Kinross

It may be a silly way, but if you remember that an owl looks like ʌ(OO)ʌ, it will perhaps help you remember that it is pronounced with something close to 'ʌoo'.

~ Jakub Marian

Ho ho ho, tell me why you are not at home' is something Santa Claus could ask you if you stayed in a hotel over Christmas. It is most certainly not the reason why it is called 'hotel', but it will hopefully help you remember that the stress is actually on the second syllable.

~ Jakub Marian

Remember that lettuce doesn’t grow on a spruce, and it also doesn’t rhyme with it.

~ Jakub Marian

Of village: it is not called so because its inhabitants are of higher age on average; in fact, there is no connection between the words “village” and “age” whatsoever.

~ Jakub Marian

Light means knowledge in the Greek language it can also be translated as illumination, knowledge, insight, understanding and wisdom

~ Sunday Adelaja