Quotes About Language

Because sometimes words were so pitifully inadequate, and I knew that, but I had to try anyway.

I stopped speaking when I realized I was no longer using any verbs or nouns, or making any sense

Sometimes words were so pitifully inadequate.

Nunca digas que no cuando en realidad quieres decir que sí.

No, I'm gonna get it. Just give me a second. I'm gonna master it just like I mastered the other kind of French. - He winks at me.

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves "comfortable" when what they mean is decadently rich.

If only they were French, the wife thinks. This would all feel different

What Wittgenstein said: What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside of this body.

The 2009 "pandemic," which was not really a pandemic at all, taught us that language is both a weapon and a handicap when waging a campaign against influenza.

Mercs used to be styled by a man called Brown Bag. I'm not joking. That was his name. Oh, he said it in Italian to make it sound more interesting, but there's no getting round the fact that Bruno Sacco means Brown Bag.

The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse.

The language we use can subtly influence our thinking. […] On the face of it, the term "web platform" seems harmless. Describing the web as a platform puts it on par with other software environments. Flash was a platform. Android is a platform. iOS is a platform. But the web is not a platform. The whole point of the web is that it is cross?platform.

What if it were true that nature speaks in signs and that the secret to understanding its language consists in noticing similarities in shape or in form?

Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit.

For it is eloquence all the same whether few things are said in many words, or many things in few words.

human language is inadequate to the divine praise

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

Contrary to common sense there is no unique "real world" that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language; that which we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.

A poem should not mean/ but be.

He swore at us in German (which I should judge to be a singularly effective language for that purpose)...

I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

I don't swear just for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should use all the words we've got. Besides, there are damn few words that anybody understands. Henry Drummond, a character in Inherit the Wind

I don't have any friends in English Departments.