quotations about language
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
MARK TWAIN
Innocents Abroad
I like you; your eyes are full of language.
ANNE SEXTON
letter to Anne Clarke, Jul. 3, 1964
Language was invented for one reason, boys -- to woo women.
N. H. KLEINBAUM
Dead Poets Society
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
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
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 evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art.
E. L. JAMES
Fifty Shades of Grey
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Language, which is the uniting bond and very medium of communion between men, is at the same time by the great variety of tongues, the means of severing and estranging nations more than anything else.
HORACE SMITH
The Tin Trumpet: Or, Heads and Tails, for the Wise and Waggish
Language is the dress of thought.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Lives of the English Poets
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People?
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
STANLEY FISH
How to Write a Sentence
All true language is incomprehensible, Like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Ci-Git
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved; it has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which unless fixed and arrested might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing as the lightning.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
On the Study of Words
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
GEORGE ORWELL
1984
Language is a living original; it is not made but grows. The growth of language repeats the growth of the plant; at first it is only root, next it puts forth a stem, then leaves, and finally blossoms.
WILLIAM SWINTON
Rambles Among Words: Their Poetry, History and Wisdom
It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words
The sole constitutional office of language being to express our ideas and sentiments, it becomes more and more perfect and useful, the more effectually it subserves this sole end of its creation.
ORSON SQUIRE FOWLER
Memory and Intellectual Improvement
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta