Quotes About Language

Harsh words are like a boll, it doesn't stick to the wall, but it will surely leave a mark.

Money doesn't grow on trees but it speaks beautifully without grammar.

Some people use language to express thought, some to conceal thought, and others instead of thoughts.

The man who uses big words is afraid that if people knew what he was talking about, they would know he didn't know what he was talking about.

The fact that God has chosen to speak to us through the Bible means that human language is sufficient, and so it is possible to obtain reliable and detailed information about God from his verbal revelation.

The Bible teaches that God has revealed himself through the words of Scripture. Nothing more is needed to settle the issue. It establishes that God is knowable and that human language is sufficient. God is able to tell us about himself, and we are able to understand what he tells us.

Although many people deprecate words in favor of images and feelings, God chose to reveal himself and to communicate with us in the words of human language. Words are able to convey in an exact and univocal manner information from God and about God. This affirms that Scripture is a meaningful divine revelation, and it also affirms that preaching and writing are able to communicate the mind of God as set forth in the Bible.

Revelation 7:9-10 reads: After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: "Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

We spent our whole lives in unconsous excercise of the art of expressing our thoughts with the help of words

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

It's not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

In short it is not as good as your painting yet; never mind, it will come; you must certainly continue your sonnets. There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing - on the contrary, isn't it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it? There is the art of lanes and colours, but the art of words is there nonetheless, and will remain.

Paul Gauguin's remark about his friend Van Gogh is not without interest: "Il oubliait même," wrote the famous painter of négresses, "d'écrire le hollandais, et comme on a pu voir par la publication de ses lettres à son frère, il n'écrivait jamais qu'en français, et cela admirablement, avec des 'Tant qu'à, Quant à,' à n'en plus finir."[1]

I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.

There are times in the writing of history when we must use words we personally abhor.

I call myself a wordkeeper, or a keeper of words. I enjoy words and looking at them on all sides… Words are magnificent… They form rhythms of living in meaningful prose… It is the force of my desire, my wish to make myself understood, that powers these words.

In the very earliest times, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to, and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. NALUNGLAQ, A NETSILIK ESKIMO

Reasoning required language, Descartes argued, and animal calls were only automatic sounds made in response to external stimuli. One of his followers, the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, summarized the Descartian view: "[Animals] eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

That complete statement which is literature.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Once again, as it has with irregular regularity throughout my waking life, that sickening sense of language buried deep within comes coursing through arms, legs, chest, throat. If only I could make it reach the brain, the conversation with myself might perhaps begin.