Language Quotes

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

George Steiner

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Sydney Pfizer

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, (attributed

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Rosenstock Huessy

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Gustave Flaubert

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

Jodi Picoult

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

Orson Scott Card

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

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

Benjamin Franklin

There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

Mark Twain

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Gaston Bachelard

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

Mark Twain

So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.

Friedrich Nietzsche

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Stephen King

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Terry Pratchett

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Robert Burchfield

No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mysterious language is not a sign of wisdom. The wiser a person is, the simpler the language he uses to express his thoughts.

Leo Tolstoy