LANGUAGE QUOTES IV
quotations about language
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET
The Blacks
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
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
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
We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Falling Through Space
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
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
CONFUCIUS
The Analects
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
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
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
PABLO NERUDA
The Book of Questions
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
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
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Speech is the best show a man puts on.
BENJAMIN LEE WHORF
Language, Thought and Reality
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 true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Essays
A man reacheth not to excellence with one language.
R. ASCHAM
attributed, Day's Collacon
All true language is incomprehensible, Like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Ci-Git
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
Perhaps the sad and empty language that today's flabby humanity pours forth, will, in all its horror, in all its boundless absurdity, re-echo in the heart of a solitary man who is awake, and then perhaps that man, suddenly realizing that he does not understand, will begin to understand.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
The Confession