LANGUAGE QUOTES
Quotations about Language
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He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
ANTONIN ARTAUD, letter to J.P., Sep. 28, 1932
High thoughts must have high language.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
GEORGE ORWELL, The Lion and the Unicorn
The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
THOMAS CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
TONI MORRISON, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1993
Language is fossil poetry.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays
An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
MARTIN BUBER, I and Thou
Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb! for I suppose he was dumb at the Creation, and must go round an entire circle in order to return to that blessed state.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, American Note-Books, Apr. 1841
Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.
HERBERT SPENCER, The Philosophy of Style
How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
HERBERT SPENCER, The Philosophy of Style
Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.
A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.
TONI MORRISON, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1993
The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Intellect," Essays
The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous.
MARIA EDGEWORTH, Angelina
A language has very little that is arbitrary in it, very little betokening the conscious power and action of man. It owes its origin, not to the thoughts and the will of individuals, but to an instinct actuating a whole people: it expresses what is common to them all: it has sprung out of their universal wants, and lives in their hearts. But after a while in intellectual aristocracy come forward, and frame a new language of their own. The princes and lords of thought shoot forth their winged words into regions beyond the scan of the people. They require a gold coinage, in addition to the common currency.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE, Guesses at Truth
- Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.
EDWARD HIRSCH, How to Read a Poem
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
GEORGE ORWELL, The English People
- Neither rings, bright chains, nor bracelets, perfumes, flowers, nor well-trimmed hair,
- Grace a man like polished language, th' only jewel he should wear.
BHARTRHARI, "The Praise of the Wise Man"
Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.
HAROLD PINTER, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 2005
Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.
J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear.... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak.
What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies. The ruthless and cynical mutilation and degradation of human beings, both in spirit and body, the death of countless thousands -- these actions are justified by rhetorical gambits, sterile terminology and concepts of power which stink. Are we ever going to look at the language we use, I wonder? Is it within our capabilities to do so?
HAROLD PINTER, "Oh, Superman," Opinion, BBC Channel 4, May 31, 1990
A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors.
LERA BORODITSKY, "How Language Shapes Thought," Scientific American, Feb. 2011
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
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