LANGUAGE QUOTES II

quotations about language

Language quote

In the commerce of language use only coin of gold and silver.

JOSEPH JOUBERT

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: Joseph Joubert


Language is what stops the heart exploding.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2008

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

ITALO CALVINO

The Uses of Literature: Essays

Tags: Italo Calvino


Problems in general are often well posed in terms of language and language remains a handy tool for explaining them. But the actual process of thinking--in any discipline--is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived--a sort of milepost--so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

"The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?", Nautilus, April 20, 2017

Tags: Cormac McCarthy


Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions.

WILLIAM BENTON CLULOW

Aphorisms and Reflections: A Miscellany of Thought and Opinion


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

Tags: Toni Morrison


A language, like a species, when extinct, never ... reappears.

CHARLES DARWIN

The Origin of Species

Tags: Charles Darwin


The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Humour, Its Theory and Technique

Tags: Stephen Leacock


Language is fossil poetry.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Essays

Tags: Ralph Waldo Emerson


Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquest.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

"Biographia Literaria", The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Prose and Verse

Tags: Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Writers rejuvenate themselves by fleeing to foreign tongues. They escape all the psychic associations that gather around a language and a literary tradition. In a sense, it's an extreme cure for writer's block. They learn to write again, in a different register. And in the process of adopting a new language, their relationship with the old one changes. It grows less familiar, less tired; with time and distance, the native language can take on the freshness and freedom of the foreign language, with all of its associated possibilities for experimentation.

E. W.

"Why do writers abandon their native language?", The Economist, March 14, 2016


For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

T. S. ELIOT

Four Quartets

Tags: T. S. Eliot


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


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

Tags: Glen Duncan


Language is the source of misunderstandings.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY

attributed, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Quotes for All Occasions

Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupery


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

Tags: Samuel R. Delany


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

Tags: Gore Vidal


A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

GASTON BACHELARD

Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

Tags: Gaston Bachelard


The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.

GAO XINGJIAN

"An Interview with Gao Xingjian", BookBrowse

Tags: Gao Xingjian


An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

MARTIN BUBER

I and Thou

Tags: Martin Buber