Language Quotes

There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.

~ Mark Nepo

Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexicon that means English is simply bursting with new possibilities, resembling the Elizabethan age in that respect. Then conceptually, science is creating new stories to tell, by deluging us with new information and potentialities. In this deluge we need art to do its usual job of sorting things out, by giving things their human dimension and by exploring how they might feel and what they might mean. So to me the arts and the sciences are completely intertwined. Maybe that's always been true, but now more than ever.

~ Kim Stanley Robinson

God did not give us the gospel to convince humanity, the gospel was given to us to master the language of a new world called God's Paradise. John 15:16.

~ Felix Wantang

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.

~ Mary Norris

I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

~ Sara Nović

..all subjects are forms of discourse and that, therefore, almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is a language describing and interpreting events, according to rules established by historians. Astronomy is not planets and stars but a special way of talking about planets and stars, quite different from the language poets use to talk about them.

~ Neil Postman

Well,’said Ernest, ‘by some strange coincidence I know this story.’Boddichek was not good at irony. ‘I knew that there was that possibility,’ he said, ‘but we have a great new way to treat it, and I thought you might want to reread it before taking a meeti

~ Jonathan Lynn

Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.

~ Maya Angelou

The standard modern measurement for inebriation is the Ose system. This has been considerably developed over the years, but the common medical consensus currently has jocose, verbose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose, adios.This is a workable but incomplete system, as it fails to take in otiose (meaning impractical) which comes just after jocose. Nor does it have grandiose preceding bellicose. And how they managed to miss out globose (amorphous or formless) before comatose is beyond me.

~ Mark Forsyth

Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.

~ Mary Norris

The alternative is to locate large deposits of specifically what we need, and extract it in bulk from the earth.”“That’s mining,” said the Drip. “There is a twenty-third century legend that youth was conscripted to work in mines. Anyhow, all young people were known as miners at one period.

~ Theodore Sturgeon

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.

~ Mary Norris

Comment sections on the internet are like gang graffiti, abusive words sprayed like gibberish and it's ugly to look at.

~ Michael P. Naughton

Toxemia. A word that starts so harsh and ends so gently.

~ Emma Hooper

To understand Jesus Christ, you must know the Language of Heaven.

~ Felix Wantang

As Richard has pointed out on several occasions, I subscribe to the irregular verb theory of life: I am a trained investigator, you have a healthy curiosity, she/he is a nosy parker.

~ Val Mcdermid

They’re not fat pigs, we’re mad scientists.

~ Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.

~ Daryl Gregory

Day starting with a smile leads you to that place where even imagination is quite hard. Smile and make your day bright since the beauty of smile is priceless and its a language that all the people around world can understand.

~ Sakin Maharjan

Fuck words, nothing spokencomprehends the defiantly ephemeral.I take my incompleteness with the rest, an exilein any language.

~ Eric Gamalinda

Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.

~ Laurence Overmire

You can lie in any language on earth, and body language is no exception.

~ Nenia Campbell

Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely understands (then at least) by a circle something different from what mathematicians understand. Similarly, when men err in calculating they have certain numbers in their mind and different ones on the paper. So if you consider what they have in mind, they really do not err, though they seem to err because we think they have in their mind the numbers which are on the paper. If this were not so, we would not believe that they were erring, just as I did not believe that he was erring whom I recently heard cry out that his courtyard had flown into his neighbor's hen, because what he had in mind seemed sufficiently clear to me.And most controversies have arisen from this, that men do not rightly explain their own mind, or interpret the mind of the other man badly. For really, when they contradict one another most vehemently, they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?

~ Tina Fey

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

~ John Mcwhorter

That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.

~ Michael Callahan

Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She's said a tearful good-bye to okay some time ago.

~ Lisa Genova

Well... why is a hard question to answer in any language.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The ancient Hebrews did not write the name of God. I often wish the Christians would follow suit, as never was a word more misused in writing and speaking than the name of the Lord.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

They spoke in semaphore, all punctuation unnecessary.“You?”“Great.”They’d trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.

~ Louise Penny

She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.

~ David Anthony Durham

The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.

~ T. Geronimo Johnson

Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known cure, but doctors have been working on it, and may get back to working on it sometime soon.

~ Mark Forsyth

Grammarians make no new thoughts, but thoughts make new grammar.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

The best grammarian still can't write a verse.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!

~ Barry Webster

In language, I discern words that fail to signify what they denote and do not adequately convey their meanings. The word happiness seeks its meaning in people and in their yearnings and their desires, while people seek the meaning of happiness in the word and in its definitions and its truths. It may well be that the meaning of the word lies discarded somewhere beneath the sun in a neglected corner of an obscure village, or in the shelter of a sycamore tree, or sleeping under a bale of cotton taken as a temporary roof, or sitting and laughing in a neighborhood gathering, or standing to contemplate the current of a stream, or stretched out and gazing up at the heavens.

~ مصطفى صادق الرافعي

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

~ Anton Chekhov

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

~ Paul Goodman