Language Quotes

Quotations
Quote of the Day
Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in moulding life than nationalism or a common language.
Hilaire Belloc

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it (Thunder on the Left)
Christopher Morley

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language
Samuel Johnson

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
John Donne

Nothing knits man to man, the Manchester School wisely taught, like the frequent passage from hand to hand of cash (The Language of Art)
Walter Sickert

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Nelson Mandela

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
George Orwell

The language and concepts contained herein are guaranteed not to cause eternal torment in the place where the guy with the horns and pointed stick conducts his business
Frank Zappa

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

[on understanding] The definition is this: to understand something is to know what it means, to know what its significance is. To understand a sentence is to know what it means, to understand a language is to know what its words and sentences mean, to understand a phenomenon more generally is to know its significance.
Tim Crane

I believe that there is a devil. Those who disagree with me in this may translate my language. All I ask is that they admit the vital truth on which I insist.
Anthony Comstock

I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin

Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.
Aphra Behn

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
Martin Heidegger

If the word 'No' was removed from the English language, Ian Paisley would be speechless.
John Hume

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth
Anna Brownell Jameson

The eyes have one language everywhere.
George Herbert

At the end of the day, flirting is a pretty universal language. Americans are more direct. British people are more indirect about everything
Rachel Weisz

Language has not the power to speak what love indites: The soul lies buried in the ink that writes
John Clare

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
George Carlin

It is not enough for language to have clarity and content: it must also have a goal and an imperative.
Rene Daumal

To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments nearly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from 'How shiny and beautiful they all are!' to 'Get that damned thing out of my mouth!'
Jaroslav Pelikan

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound

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

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

Saddam Hussein also challenged President Bush to a debate. The Butcher of Baghdad vs. the Butcher of the English language.
Jay Leno

Even if people are suspicious of the motives I think that learning and speaking two languages can only be a good thing for people.
Stephen Harper

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
William Hazlitt

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell

FEAR is an acronym in the English language for 'False Evidence Appearing Real'
Neale Walsch

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J G Ballard

The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.
J Michael Straczynski

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
James Baldwin

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.
Joseph Roux

Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks.
Jimmy Breslin

A common language is the most obvious binding element in any society.
Michael Howard

'Two peoples separated by a common language' - About the Americans and English
George Bernard Shaw

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
Elias Canetti

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned. (Maxims, 1830)
Richard Duppa

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.
Roman Jakobson

My first language was shy. It's only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.
Al Pacino

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T S Eliot

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich

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

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

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
Dale Carnegie



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