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When a language begins to teem with books, it is tending to refinement; as those who undertake to teach others must have undergone some labour in improving themselves, they set a proportionate value on their own thoughts, and wish to enforce them by efficacious expressions; speech becomes embodied and permanent; different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtains an establishment. By degrees one age improves upon another.
Samuel Johnson
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I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.
Samuel Johnson
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Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature.... A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts.
Nikola Tesla
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I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. … Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends...
J. R. R. Tolkien
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If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood an a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not "ant-made." Just so, for us, nature is all that is not man-made; the natural state of anything is its state when not modified by man.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
Ezra Pound
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In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone-and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life-he [Churchill] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
John F. Kennedy
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My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.
Mark Twain
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There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, as sand eddies in a whirlwind.
Dante Alighieri
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This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.
Rumi
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The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"I wish life was not so short," he thought. "Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."
J. R. R. Tolkien
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A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.
Victor Hugo
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Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
C. S. Lewis
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The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.
C. S. Lewis
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Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport.
Anton Chekhov
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When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing tastes, interests and capacity of his audience. These no less than the language, the marble, the paint, are part of his aw material.; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius, it is laziness and incompetence.
C. S. Lewis
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If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry - all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth.
Henry David Thoreau
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What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.
Thomas Jefferson
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The mystic must be steadily told,-All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,-universal signs, instead of these village symbols,-and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He who does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is hard for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Thomas Hardy
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We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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Dorothy L. Sayers
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