Quotes About Language

How do you say, 'Bring me steak and eggs or I'll slit your throat' in Italian?

How do you say 'bring me sausage and eggs or I'll slit your throat' in Italian?" "Look it up in the phrase book.

Fish sighed and reached for the hotel phone. 'How do you say, "Bring me steak and eggs or I'll slit your throat" in Italian?' he asked.

depends on the principle formulated by Aristotle and often recalled by St. Thomas: "The terms of language are the signs of our ideas, and our ideas are the similitude of realities.

No one can know the true meaning of the language of spiritual writers if he is unable to explain it theologically; and, on the other hand, no one can know the sublimity of theology if he is ignorant of its relations to mysticism.

The trouble is they don't write the lines I want to use any more.

You talk like winter rain.

C est quand notre milieu (naturel ou culturel) commence a nous faire du mal qu on s avise de son existence, et plus il nous decouvrira ses fragilites, plus nous y aurons mal. Ainsi decouvre-t-on sa langue quand, a l etranger, on ne peut plus la parler - ou qu on avait une patrie, quand on est exile.

An idea that is not expressed, that is not or cannot be communicated, is no idea at all.

Ik was een naakte letter zonder alfabet

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

Elle pleurait des mots qui se mélangeaient les uns aux autres.

If philosophers were always in agreement about the meaning of words, almost all their disputes would evaporate.

I believe in the magic and authority of words.

I believe in the magic and in the authority of words

Les mots qui vont surgir savent de nous ce que nous ignorons d'eux.

Being made up of distinctions, language finds it almost impossible to express undifferentiation.

If the desire of children were not mimetic, if they did not of necessity choose for models the human beings who surround them, humanity would have neither language nor culture.

Creation is the work of the Word; it is also, and by this very fact, His manifestation, his outward affirmation; and this is why the world is like a divine language, for those who know how to understand it: Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei (The heavens declare the glory of God, Ps. XIX:2)

for there are things for which a symbolical mode of expression properly so called is the only one possible, and which will consequently never be understood by those for whom symbolism is a dead letter.

Il y a là une différence qui est un peu du même genre que celle que nous avons signalée, pour la Chine, entre la langue écrite et la langue parlée : l'arabe littéral seul peut présenter toute la fixité qui est requise pour remplir le rôle de langue traditionnelle tandis que l'arabe vulgaire, comme toute autre langue servant à l'usage courant, subit naturellement certaines variations suivant les époques et suivant les régions.

les Péruviens n'ont jamais eu aucun autre procédé d'écriture, alors qu'ils possédaient une langue très parfaite et très raffinée ; cette sorte d'idéographie était rendue possible par de multiples combinaisons dans lesquelles l'emploi de fils de couleurs différentes joue un rôle important.

Dans la numération chinoise, la croix représente le nombre 10 (le chiffre romain X n'est d'ailleurs, lui aussi, que la croix autrement disposée)