Language Quotes

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

~ Benjamin Whorf

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

~ William Golding

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

~ Robert Morgan

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

~ Edward Sapir

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

~ Abraham Verghese

I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.

~ Tess Gerritsen

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.

~ Abraham Verghese

I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.

~ Larry Niven

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

~ Martin Heidegger

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

~ James A. Baldwin

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

~ Stephen Fry

I want a language that speaks the truth.

~ Studs Terkel

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.

~ Anna Jameson

Navigating a nonsober world of restaurants and bars, dinner parties, and benefits is like anything that requires practice. Like tennis or a foreign language, it gets easier the more you do it. But like all beginnings, it can be awkward. You stumble, you worry, and then there are unexpected moments of grace that give you the courage to keep going.

~ Bill Clegg

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

~ Humphry Davy

Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health.

~ George Herbert

On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film.

~ Sam Shepard

I have no idea what it would be like to be just one thing and speak one language. I feel enormously privileged to travel and be able to mingle and speak to people that, had I only known English, I wouldn't have been able to meet.

~ Cary Fukunaga

I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.

~ Pico Iyer

The things I see now on TV and in movies are so outlandish. Kids doing rude things with pies! And the language that they use! It's being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous. I can't watch it. It turns me off.

~ Sid Caesar

I've always seen movies in English with Spanish subtitles. For audiences around the world, the language is less important than if it's a good film.

~ Patricia Riggen

I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.

~ Joseph Brodsky

A shoe is not only a design, but it's a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you're going to move is quite dictated by your shoes.

~ Christian Louboutin

CSS is the design language of the web, and it is not as easy to use as it ought to be, and it can be confusing, especially if you are new to it.

~ Jeffrey Zeldman

We do not create marriage from scratch. Instead, in the elegant language of the marriage ceremony, we 'enter into the holy estate of matrimony.'

~ Nancy Pearcey

I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested in.

~ Buddy Holly

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

~ Gaston Bachelard

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

~ Robert Benchley

I don't follow anything blindly. I have to know the entire thing, if I have to get in to it. It might sound funny to you, but it's like using English language. I use an English word only when I know its meaning and understand its connotation. You won't hear me say, 'What's up, dude' or anything like that just for the heck of it.

~ Kailash Kher

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

~ Derek Walcott

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.

~ Daniel Tammet

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.

~ John Wesley Powell

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

~ William Osler

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

~ Theodore Bikel

At present, the most effective way of preventing war would be for statesmen to direct politics so as to support a sound nationalism. This leads to concordance between people of kindred race and languages, whereas the conquest and coercion of people of different race and language inevitably lead to new wars.

~ Ellen Key

Art removes boundaries and makes the world brighter. It is the common language for people all over the world. But politics are the opposite completely. Politicians, their very meaning is based on the lines they draw.

~ Asghar Farhadi

Finality is not the language of politics.

~ Benjamin Disraeli

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Any friendship or relationship is about a language.

~ Gina Bellman