Quotes About Language

Der Satz der Mathematik drückt keinen Gedanken aus.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge...

Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.

As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility.

For how would he explain to her that the sluggish bilgewater which twice, when he called the paper, lapped the receiver at the other end seemed to evoke the same squelch as her piano-key armpits.

he must have thought: this is a young fellow and a stupid German besides - that's just how all French speak of the Germans - he will be guite content with this - but the stupid German was not content (...).

Wir brauchen keine Dichter mit guter Grammatik. Zu guter Grammatik fehlt uns Geduld.

By now they had mastered my own language, but they still made simple mistakes, like using 'hermeneutics,' when they meant 'heuristic'.

For some reason I'm more appreciated in France than I am back home. The subtitles must be incredibly good.

Justo castigo Es verdad que tengo cierta facilidad de palabra y puedo sostener una conversación sobre un repertorio amplio de temas, pero me pilló por sorpresa que aquella soberbiamente proporcionada aparición reparase en mis exiguas dotes de forma tan rápida y completa.

The only criticisms I have are that, one, many are gratuitously dirty. Remember, I'm saying gratuitously. I don't mind dirty when it contributes to the funny routine, but since language was liberated in the sixties, it's embarrassing to hear acts punctuate their material with the old so-called dirty words. Apparently, the

Wurm has learned to live with his wife's peccadillos, but only because he does not know what peccadillos are as she has convinced him they're Mexican food.

coprolalia.

Decían demasiadas cortesías ridículas. Pase usted, a sus órdenes, en casa de usted, con su permiso, es propio, puta madre: todos los que según la clase media son los modales de la clase alta.

Cuando alguien me decía: Thank you, yo contestaba: Of nothing. Por eso cuando Eric me dijo en voz bajita: You look pretty american, juré que era un piropo doble. O sea que me veía bonita y gringuita. Qué pendeja.

En castellano se está enamorado, pero en inglés se cae en el amor, y luego se está en él como en el centro de un capullo.

Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.

I had always found it unpleasant to have guests in my apartment. They filled up my rooms with strange sentences I would never have formulated in such a way. Today I found the sound of these sentences particularly unbearable. Sometimes I tried to follow only the sense of the conversation so as not to hear the sounds of the language. But they penetrated my body as though they were inseparable from the sense.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention? The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar--the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

In his entirely personal experience of them, English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was from the streets. Which is to stay, stab his heart and it would bleed French, slice his brain open and its convolutions would be lined with English and German, and touch his hands and they would feel Spanish.

I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning it's head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.

But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.