Language Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Stephen King

Theodor W. Adorno

Gail Godwin

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lafcadio Hearn

Robert Benchley

Henri Matisse

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.

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

Theodor W. Adorno

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

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

While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Arthur Koestler

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

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Edward Appleton

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

James Fenimore Cooper

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

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

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.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Naomi Shihab Nye

The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat.
It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
Is it a terrible thing to be lonely?

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them. Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit.