Language Quotes
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Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder
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How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
Herbert Spencer
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I understand signifiers. We're social creatures and we have a physical language of communicating with each other. But it would be a really beautiful thing if we could all just wear what we wanted, without it meaning something… it would be a lovely place if we didn't necessarily judge or jump to conclusions because someone wants to wear a dress or because someone wants to wear pants.
Casey Legler
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Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!
Lewis Carroll
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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
Seamus Heaney
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So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography.
Ben Aaronovitch
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Music is the language of the soul; and for two people of different nations or races to unite, there is no better means than music...
Hazrat Inayat Khan
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If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Terence McKenna
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Character starts with the alphabet. Letters: words: sentences Character is a function of language—a collection of errors and deviations that resonate with certain behaviors. As with every other element in fiction, it is a record of a writer’s decisions.
Noy Holland
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Do you know of any more overwhelming and humbling expression for God's condescension and extravagance towards us human beings than that He places Himself, so to say, on the same level of choice with the world, just so that we may be able to choose; that God, if language dare speak thus, woos humankind - that He, the eternally strong one, woos sapless humanity? Yet, how insignificant is the young lover's choice between her pursuers by comparison with this choice between God and the world.
Soren Kierkegaard
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That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.
Sarah Dessen
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But people find it easy to take shots on Twitter, and to use racial slurs and bullying language far worse than what you'll see from me. It's sad and somewhat unbelievable to me that the world is still this way, but it is. I can handle it.
Richard Sherman
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She had a moment of engulfing sadness about this, about the way that even when we’re living through tragedy, the language we reach for, the only language available to us, is secondhand.
Brian Morton
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Language is a nice way to remember things.
Erin McKean
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Learning another language is like becoming another person.
Haruki Murakami
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Music is a plane of wisdom, because music is a universal language, it is a language of honor, it is a noble precept, a gift of the Airy Kingdom, music is air, a universal existence common to all the living.
Sun Ra
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How amazing that the language of a few thousand savages living on a fog-encrusted island in the North Sea should become the language of the world.
Norman St John-Stevas, Baron St John of Fawsley
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Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.
Casey Miller
