Language Quotes

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

Henry David Thoreau

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

Aldous Huxley

The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said [...], 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.

Virginia Woolf

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Marianne Moore

One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.

Voltaire

The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal.

Leo Tolstoy

God's language is action. For God, faith is a verb.

Steve Maraboli

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Max Muller

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Italo Calvino

My programming language was solder.

Terry Pratchett

It was impossible to quarrel with words, whose tremulous inequality showed indisposition so plainly.

Jane Austen

In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.

Aristotle

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

But language is wine upon his lips

Virginia Woolf

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Ferdinand De Saussure

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Harry Mathews

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

George Bernard Shaw

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

Virginia Woolf

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

George Orwell

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Arthur Schopenhauer