Quotes About Language

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions.

A word only stands for the ways in which things or happenings of the same general kind are like one another. That's why the word is public. And, being public, it can't possibly stand for the ways in which happenings of the same general kind are unlike one another.

W]ords are not the same as things and [...] a knowledge of words about facts is in no sense equivalent to a direct and immediate apprehension of the facts themselves.

Threequarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly – they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That

Las palabras pueden ser como los rayos X, si se emplean adecuadamente: pasan a través de todo. Las lees y te traspasan.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly – they'll go through anything.

Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them!

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

But to understand English is one thing; to understand an Englishman who talks is another.

Time and Space are Adverbs.

Now, for some reason or other best known to themselves, the translators of the Bible have carefully crowded out of existence and covered up every reference to the fact that the Deity is both masculine and feminine.

Every new sect aggravates the situation. Especially the Americans, grossly and crapulously ignorant as they are of the rudiments of any human language, seize like mongrel curs upon the putrid bones of their decaying monkey-jabber, and gnaw and tear them with fierce growls and howls.

Hoy el inglés se ha convertido en un idioma tan importante que hasta los norteamericanos van a tener que aprenderlo.

Prison, the supreme trap . . . where a language without words finally reveals to him the expiatory meaning of these last days.

Además, ¿cuál era mi idioma verdadero? Sabía el alemán, por mi padre. Con Ruth hablaba el inglés, idioma de mis estudios secundarios; con Mouche, a menudo el francés; el español de mi Epítome de Gramática-Estos, Fabio…- con Rosario. Pero este último idioma era también el de las Vidas de Santos, empastadas en terciopelo morado, que tanto me había leído mi Madre: Santa Rosa de Lima, Rosario.

A word is a spark in the movement of the heart

Love is the best language tutor.

We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery.

A volte le parole non bastano. E allora servono i colori. E le forme. E le note. E le emozioni.

I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information?

He spoke in english. Not flawlessly by any means. Not like a Nazi POW camp commandant who appreciates english poetry and says things like 'you know, we are much alike, you and I I'. But good enough

Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee.

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.