LANGUAGE QUOTES III
quotations about language
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In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
PABLO NERUDA
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The Book of Questions
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Language is considered by some to be the distinguishing characteristic of humanity. No other animal is capable of the kind of linguistic complexity in sound, grammar, and meaning as humans. With well over one million words in the English language alone, this makes the range of our possible expression incalculably large. Many of the sentences you compose in your day-to-day conversations may never have been said before. Ever.
NICOLA BROWN
"How Language Complexity Invalidates a Formulaic Content Approach", Skyword, April 1, 2016
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This is the strange contract between life and language: language keeps naming and life, like a woman seductively escaping her seducer's caress, keeps just a little beyond its names.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
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for many people, language is inseparable from cultural identity since it is the means by which members of communities communicate with one another, and how individuals establish that they are, in fact, members of the same cultural community.
LILY WONG FILLMORE
"What Happens When Languages Are Lost? An Essay on Language Assimilation and Cultural Identity", Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language
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Language ... isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
GORE VIDAL
Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
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Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other.
PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE
Letters Written by the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son
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If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
CONFUCIUS
The Analects
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Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee; it springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech.
BEN JONSON
Timber: Or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter
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Language is the source of misunderstandings.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
attributed, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Quotes for All Occasions
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Language is an integral part of our lives, it is an essence of our culture. But it is also power. If you don't speak the language of the land, you are at the mercy of those who do.
NATALIE SHOBANA AMBROSE
"On Pointe -- Limits of my language", The Sun Daily, March 30, 2016
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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
GEORGE ORWELL
The English People
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One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds: Selections from the Writings of the Most Celebrated Authors from the Earliest to the Present Time
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Language is easy for us to learn and use because language, like a living organism, has evolved in a symbiotic relationship with humans. Language has adapted to what our brains can do, rather than the other way around.
LINDA B. GLASER
"New book reintegrates the science of language", Cornell Chronicle, April 4, 2016
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Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.
KARL MARX
The German Ideology
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The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
"On Language", The American Democrat
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He has strangled
His language in his tears.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry VIII
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Consider: you're inventing language and you come on an object for the first time, so you name it 'tree.' Then you go on and you find another object. You have the choice of calling it tree-only-with-special-properties, such as squat, hard, gray, leafless, and branchless, for instance -- or you can name it a completely different object, say: 'rock.' And then the next object you encounter you may decide is a 'big rock,' or a 'boulder,' or a 'bush,' or 'a small, squat tree,' and so on. Now two languages will not only have different words for the same things, but they will end up having divided those same things up into categories and properties along completely different lines. And that division, as much or more than the different words themselves, will naturally mold all the thinking of the people who use that language.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Neveryon
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Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language.
NOAH WEBSTER
preface, Dictionary
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