LANGUAGE QUOTES III
quotations about language
Learning a language is the making of shared semantic agreements with others.
PHIL BAINES & ANDREW HASLAM
Type and Typography
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
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
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.
GORE VIDAL
Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia
Language is the source of misunderstandings.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
attributed, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Quotes for All Occasions
An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
MARTIN BUBER
I and Thou
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 price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Morning Yet on Creation Day
He has strangled
His language in his tears.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry VIII
Language is a virus from outer space.
WILLIAM DUCKWORTH
Twenty/Twenty
Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language.
NOAH WEBSTER
preface, Dictionary
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
Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other.
PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE
Letters Written by the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son
Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
MURIEL BARBERY
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
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
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
Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.
JOHN DRYDEN
Works of John Dryden
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET
The Blacks
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