Language Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind nor bond of society.

Johann Georg Hamann

High thoughts must have high language.

Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.

The eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language.

Gustave Flaubert

Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightest word in any language is its word for God.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

The Macedonian language is actually an artifact produced for primarily political reasons.

Language is civilization itself. The Word, even the most contradictory word, binds us together. Wordlessness isolates.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that... Painting is another form of thinking.

Gerhard Richter

He taught himself to write, retyping books by writers he admired: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner... the usual heavyweights. He said he wanted to get inside the rhythm of their language and find his own stlye.

Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.

Willard van Orman Quine

Art is the language of the tormented, but the world is blind to that, for ever blind.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God.

The representation of knowledge in symbolic form is a matter that has pre-occupied the world of documentation since its origin. The problem is now relevant in many situations other than documents and indexes. The structure of records and files in databases: data structures in computer programming; the syntactic and semantic structure of natural language; knowledge representation in artificial intelligence; models of human memory: in all these fields it is necessary to decide how knowledge may be represented so that the representations may be manipulated.

Brian Campbell Vickery

The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.

Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.

Anthony Burgess

There was a patient look on the old man's face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.

Sarah Orne Jewett

It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

Unless Parliament has conferred upon the Court that power in language which is unmistakable, the Court is not to assume that Parliament intended to do that which so seriously affect foreigners who are not resident here, and might give offence to foreign Governments. Unless Parliament has used such plain terms as show that they really intended us to do that, we ought not to do it.

Nathaniel Lindley, Baron Lindley

And this I have learned grown-ups do not know the language of shadows.

It is important for knitters to know two things about frogging: that cats are capable of this knitting action, and even seem to enjoy it and seek opportunities to do it; and that foul language is a normal, healthy accompaniment to frogging, whether it is you or the cat that accomplished the task.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.