Quotes

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
-Aldous Huxley

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
-Angela Carter

I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It's such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.
-Belva Plain

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphines
-Carl Sagan

When a language creates - as it does - a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.
-Christopher Ricks

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
-Elizabeth Bowen

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

The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.
-Henri Delacroix

Morals and manners will rise or decline with our attention to grammar.
-Jason Chamberlain

Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.
-John French

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
-Joseph Conrad

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
-Marcellinus Ammianus

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
-Penelope Lively

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
-Rita Mae Brown

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Language is wine upon the lips.
-Virginia Woolf

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks
-Alfred North Whitehead

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.
-Anna Jameson

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearne, but it is still nonsense.
-Benjamin Franklin

All language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved.
-Casey Miller

Language helps form the limits of our reality.
-Dale Spender

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
-Elizabeth Bowen

We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.
-H R Halderman

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
-Henry Brooks Adams

To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse - German.
-Jason Chamberlain

And don't confound the language of the nation With long-tailed words in osity and ation.
-John Hookham Frere

Like a diaphanous nightgown language both hides and reveals
-Karen Elizabeth Gordon

Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.
-Maya Angelou

I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.
-Penelope Lively

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
-Robert Benchley

I am the King of Rome, and above grammar.
-Sigismund

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
-Walt Whitman

For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.
-Ambrose Bierce

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
-Antonin Artaud

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
-Benjamin Lee Whorf

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

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
-E m Forster

The language of truth is simple.
-Euripides

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.
-Heinrich Heine

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
-Hermann Weyl

Grammar, which knows how to lord it over kings, and with high hands makes them obey its laws.
-Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
-John Ruskin

I have been a believer in the magic of language since at a very early age I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out
-Katherine Dunn

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
-Noam Chomsky

The most precious things in speech are pauses.
-Ralph Richardson

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
-Robert Burchfield

Language is memory and metaphor.
-Storm Jameson

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
-Andrea Dworkin

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
-Aubrey Beardsley

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have a different effect.
-Blaise Pascal

To have another language is to possess a second soul.
-Charlemagne

Don Chaucer. well of English undefyled On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.
-Edmund Spenser

If language had been the creation not of poetry but of logic, we should only have one.
-Friedrich Hebbel

If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of humn thought.
-Helen Keller

We defend ourself with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
-Iris Murdoch

A laudation in Greek is of marvellous efficacy on the title-page of a book.
-Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere

Syllables govern the world.
-John Selden

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Language is the roadmap of a culture. It tells you where its people came from and where they are going.
-Rita Mae Brown

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
-Toni Morrison