Language Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world".

Arthur Schopenhauer

The best sentence in the English language is not 'I love you' but 'It's benign'.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes.

The power of sonorous language is great, it goes to the gates of death.

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to anyone.

Albert Einstein

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.

Michel de Montaigne

Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other's language.

Leonardo da Vinci

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tears have cleansed my eyes, and errors have taught me the language of the hearts.

Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.

Charles Dickens

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

Moth: They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
Costard: O! they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.

William Shakespeare

AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.

When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum that could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.

Bertrand Russell

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, Mamma, can I open the light? She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

But we have higher mathematics, haven't we? This gives me freedom from my senses. The language of mathematics is even more inborn and universal than the language of music; a mathematical formula is crystal clear and independent of all sense organs. I therefore built a mathematical laboratory, set myself in it as if I were sitting in a car, and moved along with a beam of light.

Albert Einstein

Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.

The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Alice thought to herself, 'Then there's no use in speaking.' The voices didn't join in this time, as she hadn't spoken, but to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means—for I must confess that I don't), 'Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!

Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.

Søren Kierkegaard

This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights.

Friedrich Nietzsche