Quotes About Language

Do you happen to remember me, young man?' asked the archbishop kindly, surprisingly speaking in French instead of Latin. 'No, Monseigneur, I cannot honestly say that I do,' replied Arn with embarrassment, looking at the ground.

He was used to her tears. They were a kind of language that needed expression.

Who ever thought up the word "Mammogram?" Every time I hear it, I think I'm supposed to put my breast in an envelope and send it to someone.

Whoever thought up the word 'mammogram'? Every time I hear it, I think I'm supposed to put my breast in an envelope and send it to someone.

The gardenia is an enigma, its petals dusted with the creamy white purity of innocence, but its aroma is wildly seductive. How appropriate; for in the language of flowers, the gift of gardenias conveys the message of secret love. —DB

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.

I've barely said five words to you. What indication could you possibly have that I am a Yankee?" "Well, we could start with the words 'what indication.' Someone from south of the Mason-Dixon would have said, 'Who the hell are you calling a Yankee?' Then we would have fought.

"Only a novel"… in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Only a novel"... in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

The idle mind, which demands rules, i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing with it, he will use imperfective, if he stands outside and merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use the perfective

Language is the un conscious or at least subconscious product of the group, the herd, the race, the nation. Literature is the product more or less conscious of the individual genius, using of course the tools made by the blind herd, but, after the manner of living organisms, shaping these tools even as he uses them.

Youth is, I believe, contrary to all tradition, the time when Rational Thought dominates and allures. It is because they turned on the world the eager clear-eyed curiosity of a noble child that the Greeks are always young and their language essentially the language of youth.

The Russian verb is weak in tenses, strong in Aspects. [...] These aspects are in the very blood of the Slav. [...] These aspects I believe to be of profound psychological significance and this significance has not I think so far been fully understood.

Aspect or quality of a verb had, I believe, nothing originally to do with time; aspect in fact cuts clean across time. Aspect in most languages is now at least indicated for the most part by adverbs. I run — quickly; I stand — still; in this sense many verbs have hundreds of aspects.

The English language like the English people is good at particular emergencies, but hopelessly unsystematic.

If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as paint¬ ing or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.

By a false etymology they explained the word Dithyrambos as meaning "He of the double door," their word thyra being the same as our door.

I have had a suspicion all my life that in the current dictionaries and grammars often the real explanation and origin of a word or a grammatical form is to be found in something that comes in just at the end as a 'derived' form or 'exceptional' use. This I believe to be the case with the aorist; the true primitive essential aorist I believe to be the gnomic, the temporal aorist a later derivative, in fact the aorist I believe to be primarily not a tense at all but an aspect.

Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all , it has only aspects.

K]nowing how primitive in many aspects, now little abstract, how uncontaminated by logic and logical structure Hebrew is, it would surely have occured to me to ask, is not aspect wherever and whenever it occurs a thing more primitive, more psychologically fundamental than time order, than tense? Was there not a time in the development of language when primitive man focussed his attention not on time order but on something else expressed by aspect, and what is that something?

You don't need to," he replied. "You're already saved." And he went on to tell me that the original Greek meaning of the word saved meant that a person was whole.

I whisper, losing myself in my native language as I sing her praises. Her beauty and innocence slay me, and my voice is hoarse with the effort of holding back. "Ty takaya krasivaya. Takoy nevinnyy," I murmur. You're so beautiful. So innocent

All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind. This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind.

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.