Language Quotes
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Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories.
George Eliot
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Vague and mysterious forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words with little or no meaning have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance and hindrance of true knowledge.
John Locke
Nazareth
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Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
William Lewis Safir
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What the eye is to the lover — that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue — is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.
Benedict Anderson
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A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
Marcel Proust
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We say that money talks, but it speaks a broken, poverty-stricken language. Hearts talk better, clearer, and with wider intelligence.
William Allen White
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We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.
Juan Goytisolo
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Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.
Alexandre Dumas
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A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.
Ben Lerner
