Language Quotes

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

~ Rebecca Solnit

There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.

~ Lenore Kandel

Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.

~ Lenore Kandel

There are so many words in our language, we get to know so few of them.

~ David Levithan

Languages, symbols and universals do not change, they cannot by virtue of what they – thus, with the passing of the Ages, Tradition does not change, but the form in which it decides to manifest does – thus some religions succeed whilst others fail and become extinct. Tradition itself can never cease to exist, but the religions which are its voice perish with the rise and fall of civilizations

~ Gwendolyn Taunton

Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.

~ Eduardo Galeano

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it. Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording. The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life.

~ Irving Finkel

Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Like language, I think any who have not acquired spirituality by a certain age are doomed to be never fluent and you are likely to mimic the one that surrounds you.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Language has created a barrier that prevents us from seeing existence as it truly is.

~ Chris Matakas

Language is a serious weapon in shining and sharing Truth. It is also a serious weapon used in its distortion.

~ Suzy Kassem

No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.

~ Carl Sagan

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

~ Italo Calvino

It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.

~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today’s heritage and our new compositions to the future.

~ M. Fethullah Gülen

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…

~ Charles Finch

I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the other hand, is just a command to ‘go do’.

~ Jodi Picoult

Speak English! said the Eaglet. I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either! And the Eaglet bend down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.

~ Lewis Carroll

The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests.

~ Henry Hitchings

Nations that can manage to develop their language and make it accommondating while at the same time staying faithful to the roots of it are the most communicative societies that are also most dynamic in thought.

~ M. Fethullah Gülen

The smartest people can write the worst emails and those of less intellect can write the best.

~ Paul Babickii

Language is a social energy, and our capacity for articulate speech is the key factor that makes us different from other species. We are not as fast as cheetahs – or even as horses. Nor are we as strong as bulls or as adaptable as bacteria. But our brains are equipped with the facility to produce and process speech, and we are capable of abstract thought. A bee may dance to show other bees the location of a source of food, a green monkey may deliver sophisticated vocal signals, and a sparrow may manage as many as thirteen different types of song, but an animal's system of communication has a limited repertoire; ours, on the other hand, is 'open', and its mechanisms permit a potentially infinite variety of utterances.

~ Henry Hitchings

A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

~ Mehek Bassi

To make a simple change of a typeface can instantly transform text which had the appearance and tone of a joyous announcement to suddenly convey that of a somber tragedy.

~ Paul Babicki

Language also acts like love in form.

~ Alena Graedon

What if, right now, as we’re immolating language, we’re doing away with ourselves? Maybe we’ve regressed. The skills we once used for survival – scattered attention, diffuse concentration – have been adapted to finding glowing dots on screens, skimming pop-ups, beams, emails, video streams.

~ Alena Graedon

I don’t think I have as many friends as I thought I did, not close ones, not many who I connect with on that deep level of language that doesn’t just allow us to be ourselves with each other but allows us to be understood, even when we’re not saying anything.Silence—awkward or comfortable—is a language too. Awkward silence screams, “We have nothing in common.” Comfortable silence proves just how much we do.

~ Erin Mccahan

He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.

~ Ben Aaronovitch

Poetry helps heal wounds.Makes them tangible.At the poetry reading I reada poem.A prophecy I wrote down. Almost couldn't go through with it.But it came outhurried and hotand by the endmy tongue was on fire.

~ Isabel Quintero

Words tend to last a big longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear - flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands - and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.

~ Paul Auster

Music is the language of the universe, which everyone, including all animals, can understand.

~ Debasish Mridha

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme.

~ Michel Foucault

Language is a door. Words en-trance and are an entrance; they draw you in. When you read, the book you cradle disappears and the tales within unfold in your mind. Writing is a shelter of words and reading an interior adventure.

~ Laurie Seidler

A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.

~ Mark Forsyth

The Holy Bible is the Spirit of God exposed to humanity in the Language of Heaven.

~ Felix Wantang

Who could trust language?

~ Anne Rice

It's not about the language, it's about the message

~ Goitsemang Sandra Mvula

Most adults have a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, meaning that children must learn 10 to 20 words a day between the ages of eight months and 18 years. And yet the most frequent 100 words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4000 words account for 98% of conversation.

~ David Miller