Language Quotes

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Edith Wharton

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

George Orwell

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

Jack Gilbert

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.

Paul De Man

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

David Lodge, The State of the La

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Aubrey Beardsley

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

George Eliot

Tears are the silent language of grief.

Voltaire

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Richard Chevenix Trench

At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow.

Neil Gaiman

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

Source Unknown

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.

Henri Delacroix

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Sir Humphrey Davy

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

Kurt Vonnegut

She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.

Orson Scott Card

Indeed, in many respects she was quite English and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the language

Oscar Wilde

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The eyes have one language everywhere.

George Herbert