Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Language.
Every man is a part of each and our senses are attached to both. So when a man speaks of himself as a man, he is in matter; but when he speaks a scientific truth, he is out of matter and so far equal to god. So man's investigations are but an imitation of wisdom's experiments for his own happiness. And man not wanting to be outdone by his father tries to imitate what he sees and hears; this makes man a kind of progressive being. Man invents language from the fact that he cannot be satisfied to let God or wisdom dictate his acts, so he invents language to explain his wisdom. It has been said that language was invented to deceive others. In some cases I have no doubt but the world thinks it does but wisdom gives it another direction; or language acts to undeceive and it often exposes our ignorance.
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, August
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin
When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.
Christopher Ricks
I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)
Jodi Picoult
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
Samuel Johnson
In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
Ferdinand De Saussure
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
George Orwell
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
Roland Barthes
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Thomas Hardy
Language is the pedigree of nations.
Johnson
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
Octavio Paz
Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.
Richard D. Rosen
A different language is a different vision of life.
Federico Fellini
Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.
John French
Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
Virginia Woolf
