LANGUAGE QUOTES IV
quotations about language
Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.
JOHN DRYDEN
Works of John Dryden
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
STEPHEN HAWKING
British Telecom advertisement, 1993
Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
MURIEL BARBERY
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.
KARL MARX
The German Ideology
To clothe low-creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy but flat foolery; it rather loads than raises a wren, to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.
THOMAS FULLER
The Holy State and the Profane State
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
CONFUCIUS
The Analects
We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
PABLO NERUDA
The Book of Questions
Language is originally and essentially nothing but a system of signs or symbols, which denote real occurrences, or their echo in the human soul.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
At the end of the day, good language is bold language.
FRANCESCO CLEMENTE
"Pamela Love and Francesco Clemente Reflect on Decades of Collaboration", Vogue, April 4, 2016
Language is a window to the world.
SUSANNA ZARAYSKY
Language Is Music: Over 100 Fun & Easy Tips to Learn Foreign Languages
We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Falling Through Space
If the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now -- well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.
MAX VENTILLA
"Learn Different: Silicon Valley disrupts education", The New Yorker, March 7, 2016
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
A man reacheth not to excellence with one language.
R. ASCHAM
attributed, Day's Collacon
The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
A country without a language is a country without a soul.
ELIZABETH GREIWE
"The luck of the Irish language student", Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2016