LANGUAGE QUOTES III
quotations about language
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Language is the sole instrument through which all life's activities are performed. Language is therefore not merely a picture of reality per se but also a willing instrument of the language-user to map the reality.
R. C. PRADHAN
Language, Reality, and Transcendence: An Essay on the Main Strands of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.
GAO XINGJIAN
"An Interview with Gao Xingjian", BookBrowse
Learning a language is the making of shared semantic agreements with others.
PHIL BAINES & ANDREW HASLAM
Type and Typography
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Morning Yet on Creation Day
One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds: Selections from the Writings of the Most Celebrated Authors from the Earliest to the Present Time
Thought is not language. Thought is not based on language. Thought does not depend on language; language is not a condition for thought. There is no essential connection between language and thinking except in two senses: that language is a translating device for the imperfect expression of thought or of the awareness of experience; and without thinking humans could not produce language.
AMOREY GETHIN
Language and Thought: A Rational Enquiry Into Their Nature and Relationship
He has strangled
His language in his tears.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry VIII
Language is a virus from outer space.
WILLIAM DUCKWORTH
Twenty/Twenty
At the end of the day, good language is bold language.
FRANCESCO CLEMENTE
"Pamela Love and Francesco Clemente Reflect on Decades of Collaboration", Vogue, April 4, 2016
for many people, language is inseparable from cultural identity since it is the means by which members of communities communicate with one another, and how individuals establish that they are, in fact, members of the same cultural community.
LILY WONG FILLMORE
"What Happens When Languages Are Lost? An Essay on Language Assimilation and Cultural Identity", Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language
Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
MURIEL BARBERY
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
"On Language", The American Democrat
A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step.
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
Language
Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.
HAROLD PINTER
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 2005
We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Falling Through Space