Language Quotes

Music is the language of all. It tames the savage beast and allows us to get over heartbreak. It helps us express what we really want to say and it has the power to lift hearts and awaken our souls….

~ James A. Murphy

She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English, it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.

~ Héctor Tobar

If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.

~ Bill Bryson

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.

~ Victor Klemperer

Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

~ Cynthia Ozick

That one of history’s greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.

~ Ross King

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.

~ Heinrich Heine

Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can describe in any page-filling paragraph that can't be captured better in just a sentence or two? Perhaps even nothing in any sentence which cannot better be refined in a single, spot-on word? Does it not follow, then, that there's likely nothing one can say in any word - in saying anything at all - that, ultimately, isn't better left unsaid? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

~ Mort W. Lumsden

Mr Hawkins said nothing, the Hawkins' domestic affairs were arranged upon the principle that Fanny supplied the talk and he the silence.

~ Susanna Clarke

...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

The topics which language limits us to aren’t much worth discussing in the first place.(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

~ Mort W. Lumsden

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

~ Samuel Johnson

If you use the term 'over-exaggerate,' you know the definition neither of 'exaggerate' nor of 'over.

~ Rodney Ulyate

That’s when I have to ask him. “Can you really talk like that? Being holy and all?”“What? Because I’m a priest?” He finishes the dregs of his coffee. “Sure. God knows what’s important.

~ Markus Zusak

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

~ Elfriede Jelinek

i lost a whole continent.a whole continent from my memory.unlike all other hyphenated americans my hyphen is made of blood.when africa says hellomy mouth is a heartbreakbecause i have nothing in my tongueto answer her.i don’t know how to say hello to my mother.

~ African-American Ii Nayyirah Waheed

Music is the Universal Language that allows all people to communicate with each other.

~ Ellen J. Barrier

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

~ Adrienne Rich

Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee.

~ Ben Jonson

To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

~ S.i. Hayakawa

Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I’d gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were “stressed out”.

~ David Sedaris

The unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created languages to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions come from ancient comic writers. And the ultimate goal of comics is same as the purpose of humanity – to break free from language.

~ Manu Joseph

You are. Before you are whatever you are labeled.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.

~ Kevin Crossley-Holland

There is a rhythm to our language. they echo the rhythm of our life.

~ Ninotaziz

When animals do something noble we say they are behaving ‘like humans’. When humans do something disgusting we say they are behaving ‘like animals’. Clumsy use of the English language perpetuates the myth that animals are inferior and disposable beings.

~ Phillip Wollen

If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.

~ Samuel Johnson

The language I learned was pretty, full of passivity and silence. I had no proper language for the issues of blood and anger, yet much of what went on when I was a child made me angry. There were no words a nice girl could use to describe anger; her options were to remain silent or to use indiscreet language, the kind that curls in a room like smoke and soon disappears. We girls were taught to speak safely and to bandage our anger with polite, pretty words. We might talk about the anger only in questions and sighs, unable to curse, yell or break windows in the beautiful garden.

~ Beth Bagley

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. I hate this language. It changes too often!

~ Rick Riordan

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

~ George Steiner

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

~ Brian Friel

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.

~ George Bernard Shaw

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...

~ George Bernard Shaw

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

~ Patrick Cockburn

[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.

~ Terry Eagleton

If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?

~ Meg Wolitzer