Quotes About Language

Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)

A film has to star Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris before it begins to pose a bigger threat to the language than yellow journalism.)

Of a bad playwright: "Saying nothing is the mother tongue of his art.

The wretched of the earth get no help from witch doctors, and when academic language gets beyond shouting distance of ordinary speech, voodoo is all it is.

The world's longest, as far as I know, ghazal ("Bowls of Food") in its wandering wonders what's hidden in language, in the talk of plants, and in the moment, which, it says, is an embryo inside an eggshell that shatters into birth to become birdsong, and God! Such an astonishing image for the transformative edge of the present.

Swearing is an art form. You can express yourself much more directly, much more exactly, much more succinctly, with properly used curse words.

i heard on their lips the language of passion, of betrayal and jealousy, and sometimes despair - languages with which I was all too familiar.

The word "pure" has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it – in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.

He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.

closed my eyes and diverted my mind from the awful sounds by thinking about language. I'd always thought of it as a friend. It's guided me through life and shown me new directions. Each new language I learned added to me. I became richer. But a language you don't know, sir, that is one mean, unfriendly son of a bitch. It's rude and secretive and it pushes you away, keeps you on the outside. And that's where I am now, on the outside.

Dogs, by this same logic, bark at what they cannot understand.

Although the Word is common to all, many live as if they had a private understanding of their own

This language, which constantly imposes images, militates against the development and expression of concepts.

The real universe of ordinary language is that of the struggle for existence. It is indeed an ambiguous, vague, obscure universe, and is certainly in need of clarification. Moreover, such clarification may well fulfill a therapeutic function, and if philosophy would become therapeutic, it would really come into its own.

Revolution is not intelligible and certainly not reasonable within the thought forms and language of this current world; revolution requires faith. When he speaks of the new world, the world to come, the revolutionary cannot describe it as a change of conditions within this world which, upon calculation, will be found to be preferable, he can only speak in parables, hoping that he will awaken his listener to share his vision and faith.

In metaphor we say what we mean, but we don't mean what we say. In analogy we mean what we say, but we don't know what we mean.

Herbert Schildt

C gives the programmer what the programmer wants; few restrictions, few complaints... C++ maintains the original spirit of C, that the programmer not the language is in charge.

Chocolate knows no boundaries; speaks all languages; comes in all sizes; is woven through many cultures and disciplines ... it impacts mood, health, and economics, and it is a part of our lives from early childhood through the elderly years.

The parallel, rather, is with human language. It is human to have the ability to speak, an essential part of the image of God in us. Nonetheless, concrete language, which exists in countless forms, is not native but acquired; it is learned.

Language is the soul of a nation, the custodian of the goods and treasures of humankind, the bond that unites human beings, peoples, and generations, the one great tradition that unites in consciousness the world of humankind, which is one by nature.

Republicans have been losing the war of words for years now. Now they are just caving because they don't even want to try. I don't agree with that approach.

Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.