Language Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Stephen King

Theodor W. Adorno

Gail Godwin

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lafcadio Hearn

Robert Benchley

Henri Matisse

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

Theodor W. Adorno

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.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

Willard van Orman Quine

The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.

George Saintsbury

For 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

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain'... I could never see these qualities in paint – I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.

Robert Rauschenberg

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.

Anna Brownell Jameson

The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution…. There should be, therefore, great resistance to … redefining the category of rights deemed to be fundamental. Otherwise, the Judiciary necessarily takes to itself further authority to govern the country without express constitutional authority.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content … it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

A masculine education cannot spare from professional study and the necessary acquisition of languages, the time and attention which I have bestowed on the compositions of my countrymen.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

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

Gaston Bachelard

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Thornton Wilder

If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.

John Jay Chapman

Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

Johannes V. Jensen

Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!