Language Quotes

Falling in love is like learning a whole new language and the culture that goes along with it. When you fall out of love it can be hard to pick up where you left off and start a new.

~ Isabella Poretsis

The written word is what distinguishes us from all other animal life forms on this earth.

~ Mommy Moo Moo

If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.

~ James Rozoff

I am beginning to worry that my speech is becoming a rather incomprehensible mixture of a Victorian woman, an Australian Beach Bum and a Laddish city boy

~ C.s. Woolley

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

~ William H. Gass

Carmen's speciality is national news, and her greatest pleasure is finding inconsistencies in the declarations of politicians: syntactical errors, and – why not? – howlers. The one she has the most fun with is the mayor. Someone who can't speak shouldn't be in charge of a city, she's always saying. And, far from being elitist, her observation alludes to the obvious contempt a certain affluent social class – from which the mayor hails – feels for language (words, meaning, syntax, conjugation, use of prepositions, solipsisms) and which she, a secondary-teacher of language and literature for more than thirty years, refuses to countenance.

~ Claudia Piñeiro

What the devil is 'wordsharing'? Does the word for 'speak' mean 'listen' just as well? If I said, 'Listen to me!' you might talk, instead.What use is the one without the other? It took me a long time to see this distinction in Valan speech.Spinel thought over the list of 'share forms': learnsharing, worksharing, lovesharing. Do you say 'hitsharing,' too? If I hit a rock with a chisel, does the rock hit me?I would think so. Don't you feel it in your arm?He frowned and sought a better example; it was so obvious, it was impossible to explain. I've got it: if Beryl bears a child, does the child bear Beryl? That's ridiculous.A mother is born when her child comes.Or if I swim in the sea, does the sea swim in me?Does it not?Helplessly he thought, She can't be that crazy. Please, you do know the difference, don't you?Of course. What does it matter?

~ Joan Slonczewski

To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

Jerkish. That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees - and there was no doubt (...) that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and the west, it would be the language of the future.

~ Ivan Klíma

Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being

~ Trevor Noah

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

~ Edith Wharton

Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write” Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write

~ George Sand

But the sheep had taught him something even more important: that there was a universal language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.

~ Paulo Coelho

To start speaking my language start reading what I read... start reading what I have written. Listen to what I have listened.

~ Deyth Banger

Whenever the nature of the subject permits the reasoning process to be without danger carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in the contrary case it should be so constructed, that there shall be the greatest possible obstacle to a mere mechanical use of it

~ John Stuart Mill

The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

~ C.s. Lewis

There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

~ Patrice Nganang

I've tried to use sex in place of language, but no one yet has been capable of processing the imagery, references, and metaphors I imbue into my thrusts, so I've returned to common English.

~ Jacqueline Novak

The language we use can subtly influence our thinking. […]On the face of it, the term “web platform” seems harmless. Describing the web as a platform puts it on par with other software environments. Flash was a platform. Android is a platform. iOS is a platform. But the web is not a platform. The whole point of the web is that it is cross‐platform.

~ Jeremy Keith

The degree to which language exactly mirrors reality is debatable.

~ Rictor Norton

The Almost Forgotten Human Language is ‘Feeling.

~ Jasz Gill

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former

~ Ben Lerner

As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully.

~ Steven Pinker

If I build own language... will be better because I always will end up making new words.

~ Deyth Banger

Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair.

~ André Alexis

Regardless of what language it is said in, I love you stays beautiful, and two hearts beating together make the same sound. It is the language of Love.

~ Christina Engela

Sanskrit is a beautiful contextual language. It is called “Dev Bhasha” the language of the soul. Here, meanings of the words must come from the heart, from direct experience – dictionary meanings or static meanings have not much value. Meanings of the words vary depending on mind-set, time, location and culture. The words are made to expand the possibilities of the mind.

~ Amit Ray

He liked to address every man in his own language, as a good European should.

~ H.g. Wells

Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words - for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.

~ Anne Tyler

The way people want to get respect for their culture and language, it is critical to reciprocate the same to other else you don't have any right to condemn others

~ Pankaj Gupta

Your language looks like a treasure map,' she said, 'if you forget all the rest of the letters and focus in on the x, it looks as if you could find out where the treasure is.

~ Kirmen Uribe

I refuse to be linguistically constrained by dictionary writers.

~ Amy E. Reichert

If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

We each have our own language.Our own way of thinking, of talking to ourselves, of making sense of the world and putting it in order. A narration style that is ours and ours alone. That's why some of us connect and some of us don't. Because even though we can only live in our own heads, sometimes - every now and then - we meet a person we can talk to without speaking at all: whose story we can read, without even trying.

~ Holly Smale

Language was just that thing that happened when you opened your mouth at the table, squeezed a few noises out of your vocal chords, and induced Socrates thereby to pass the salt.

~ Randy Allen Harris

One's identity derives not from one's nation or blood but from the language one uses.

~ Minae Mizumura

At the end of the second week they were still working and Arretapec, Conway and their patient were being talked, whistled, cheeped and grunted about in every language in use at the hospital.

~ James White

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn't just to introduce new words (boi, cis-gendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly. Like when you whisper, You're just a hold, letting me fill you up. Like when I say husband.

~ Maggie Nelson

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.

~ Robert M. Pirsig