Quotes About Language

I reflected that even in the languages of humans there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say the jaguar is to say all the jaguars that engendered it, the deer and turtles it has devoured, the grass that fed the deer, the earth that was mother to the grass, the sky that gave light to the earth

Cuando se acerca el fin, ya no quedan imágenes del recuerdo; sólo quedan palabras. No es extraño que el tiempo haya confundido las que alguna vez me representaron con las que fueron símbolos de la suerte de quien me acompañó tantos siglos. Yo he sido Homero; en breve seré Nadie, como Ulises; en breve seré todos: estaré muerto.

El hecho de que toda filosofía sea de antemano un juego dialéctico, una Philosophie des Als Ob, ha contribuido a multiplicarlas.

As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.

What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech

A rhyme turns an idea into a law; and, in a sense, each poem is a linguistic codex.

Scratch on, my pen: let's mark the white the way it marks us.

A word's fate depends on the variety of its contexts, on the frequency of its usage.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).

Il poeta, ripeto, è il mezzo di cui la lingua si serve per esistere. O, come ha detto il mio amato Auden, è colui in cui e per cui la lingua vive.

The reason English-speaking readers can hardly tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is because they read neither prose. They're reading Constance Garnett.

Had art indeed depended on experience as much as the critical profession wants us to believe, we'd have far more – and far better – art on our hands than we do. A poet is always the product of his – that is, his nation's – language, to which living experiences are what logs are to fire

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.

During World War One, our country had used other Indians, Cherokees and Chickasaws, to send messages in their own language to confuse the enemy.

One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.

CAMPBELL: All poets. Poetry is a metaphorical language. MOYERS: A metaphor suggests potential. CAMPBELL: Yes, but it also suggests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.

How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know.

As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent.

What can't be known or named except in our feeble attempt to clothe it in language.

Silence gives meaning to the language of the eyes; and silence of the lips cannot keep the secret that a glance betrays.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words ' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.