Language Quotes

Love is the universal language.

~ A.d. Posey

It's now what enters men's mouths that's evil. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

~ Paulo Coelho

The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

~ George Steiner

Consciousness (here and now) is notfalse and misleading because of language; consciousness is language, andnothing else, because it is false and misleading.

~ Paul De Man

I do not mean, of course, that we can always accurately express our conscious thoughts with Proustian accuracy. Consciousness overflows language: we perceive vastly more than we can describe.

~ Stanislas Dehaene

The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as the environment -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound division between it an ourselves. We have given up the understanding -- dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought -- that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than they other.

~ Wendell Berry

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

~ Marcel Duchamp

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.

~ Bill Watterson

Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud, 'This blows ass.' She nods sympathetically. She doesn't understand, but of course, in her way she understands completely.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.” Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

~ Frank Herbert

..i spill intothe kind of silenceonly Khalil Gibran would understand.

~ Sanober Khan

At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is his own particular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into contact with each other, a greater or lesser number of individuals who understand each other's mode of expression to varying degrees, etc.

~ Antonio Gramsci

How is it 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

Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.

~ Andrés Neuman

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

~ Roland Barthes

If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

~ China Miéville

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.

~ Paul Celan

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

~ Chinua Achebe

We float in language like icebergs – four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.

~ Aldous Huxley

Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience. It is not necessarily comfortable.It is not necessarily safe.

~ Lenore Kandel

The years of his life had not been gentle, and there was something untamable about him; his eyes seemed to say everything and nothing at all, almost as if they spoke a dying language few could appreciate or even understand.

~ Chris Nicolaisen

silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

~ George Orwell

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very, otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

~ C.s. Lewis

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

~ Margaret Atwood

I like you; your eyes are full of language.[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

~ Anne Sexton

Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?

~ Melina Marchetta

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.

~ J.k. Rowling

Instead of the word 'love' there was an enormous heart, a symbol sometimes used by people who have trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes.

~ Lemony Snicket

It wasn't that Henry was less of himself in English. He was less of himself out loud. His native language was thought.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

~ Ernest Hemingway

When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.

~ Lewis Carroll

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

~ Anthony Doerr

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

~ George Orwell

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

~ Douglas Adams

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

~ Aldous Huxley

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Language is the only homeland.

~ Czesław Miłosz