Language Quotes

True eloquence consists of saying all that should be not all that could be said.

La Rochefoucauld

Even if language is a living evolving organism we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive it can get sick.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Our language one of our most precious natural resources deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands streams and whooping cranes.

His words were softer than oil yet they were drawn swords.

Bible

Language is an inventory of human experience.

Change is legitimate and inevitable for our language is a mighty river picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there but growing ever wider and richer.

The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflation.

A word has its use Or like a man it will soon have a grave.

Edward Arlington Robinson

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.

Bertrand Russell

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

Every utterance is an event and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view therefore is that no word ever means the same thing twice.

Louis B. Saloman

It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed the deeper they burn.

If you can teach me a new word I'll walk all the way to China to get it.

Turkish Proverb

I have always suspected that correctness is the last refuge of those who have nothing to say.

Friedrich Wasiman

A word after a word after a word is power.

Margaret Atwood

In certain trying circumstances urgent circumstances desperate circumstances profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

Words are feminine deeds are masculine.

Baltasar Gracián

Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.

When an idea is wanting a word can always be found to take its place.

Goethe

Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

Like stones words are laborious and unforgiving and the fitting of them together like the fitting of stones demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Edmund Morrison

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression.

Anthony Burgess

Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.

Man's command of the language is most important. Next to kissing it's the most exciting form of communication.

Plain English - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

You have to fall in love with hanging around words.

Language is the armoury of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Everyone hears only what he understands.

Goethe

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Language most shows a man speak that I may see thee.

Similes are like songs of love: They much describe they nothing prove.

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.

Aeschylus

A language is a dialect with its own army and navy.

The word is half his that speaks and half his that hears it.

Michel de Montaigne

A single word often betrays a great design.

Jean Baptiste Racine

Words once spoken can never be recalled.

Wentworth Dillon

Some words are like the old Roman galleys large-scaled and ponderous. They sit low in the water even when their cargo is light.

William Jovanovich

It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours but the art of words exists too and will never be less important.

Vincent van Gogh

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Words like eyeglasses blur everything that they do not make clear.

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

More than kisses letters mingle souls.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using now that everyone is using theirs?

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out communication is getting through.

Sydney J. Harris

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

George Bernard Shaw

The Englishman loves to roll his tongue around the word 'extraordinary'. It so pleases him that he is reluctant to finish the sound which goes on into harmonics and overtones. The North American publisher is likewise inclined.

R. I. Fitzhenry

But for my own part it was Greek to me.

William Shakespeare

I am the King of Rome and above grammar.

Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund

Language as well as the faculty of speech was the immediate gift of God.

The whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

Bible

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

George Bernard Shaw

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned or of dictionary-makers but is something arising out of the work needs ties joys affections tastes of long generations of humanity and has its bases broad and low close to the ground.

Babel because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.

Bible

Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .

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