Language Quotes

They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.

~ Paul Celan

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.

~ Ben Marcus

The language of the heartIs the only languageThat everybody can understand.

~ Sri Chinmoy

To speak only one language is to do yourself a great injustice.

~ Michelle Templet

And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

~ Muriel Barbery

I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.

~ Sol Stein

I think we can all agree that the official language of the United States should be Latin.

~ Michelle Templet

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

~ Victor Hugo

'twas bryllig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe All mimsy were the borogoves And the mome raths out grabe.

~ Lewis Carroll

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

~ Charles Péguy

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

~ Max Miiller

Dialect words - those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

~ Thomas Hardy

Eloquence is the language of nature and cannot be learned in the schools but rhetoric is the creature of art which he who feels least will most excel in.

~ Charles Caleb Colton

For words like Nature half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

He multiplieth words without knowledge.

~ Bible

If you were to make little fishes talk they would talk like whales.

~ Oliver Goldsmith

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

~ Bible

Languages are the pedigree of nations.

~ Samuel Johnson

Let thy speech be short comprehending much in few words.

~ Bible

Letter-writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.

~ Lord Byron

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone but principally by catch words.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Many terms which have now dropped out of favour will be revived and those that are at present respectable will drop out if useage so choose with whom resides the decision and the judgment and the code of speech.

~ Horace

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

~ Nathanael West

Soft words are hard arguments.

~ Thomas Fuller

Thanks to words we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

~ Aldous Huxley

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

~ Clifton Fadiman

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.

~ Ned Rorem

The two most beautiful words in the English language are cheque enclosed.

~ Dorothy Parker

The medium is the message.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones. Many have fallen by the edge of the sword but not so many as have fallen by the tongue.

~ Ecclesiasticus

The thoughtless are rarely wordless.

~ Howard W. Newton

We must have a better word than prefabricated why not ready-made?

~ Winston Churchill

We must think things not words or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand if we are to keep to the real and the true.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Words are the small change of thought.

~ Jules Renard

Words should be weighed and not counted.

~ Yiddish Proverb

Since the concepts people live by are derived only from perceptions and from language and since the perceptions are received and interpreted only in light of earlier concepts man comes pretty close to living in a house that language built.

~ Russell R. W. Smith

If a conceptual distinction is to be made the machinery for making it ought to show itself in language. If a distinction cannot be made in language it cannot be made conceptually.

~ N. R. Hanson

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.

~ Christian Morgenstern

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

~ Thomas Hobbes