Language Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

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.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

Arthur Koestler

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.

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

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

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.

The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.

William Strunk Jr.

This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.

John Millington Synge

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.

Anna Brownell Jameson

The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs.

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

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.

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