Quotes About Language

Cuanto más te acercas a lo esencial, menos puedes nombrarlo. El tuétano de los libros está en las esquinas de las palabras. Lo más importante de las buenas novelas se agolpa en las elipsis, en el aire que circula entre los personajes, en las frases pequeñas.

los escritores escribimos mucho mejor de lo que hablamos)

Sin embargo, y a pesar de ello, los escritores nos empeñamos en poner #Palabras en la nada

Las palabras son como peces abisales que sólo te enseñan un destello de escamas entre las aguas negras. Si se desenganchan del anzuelo, lo más probable es que no puedas volverlas a pescar. Son mañosas las palabras, y rebeldes, y huidizas. No les gusta ser domesticadas.

For it did seem to be the case, she reflected, that the owners of art galleries were very frequently men who were unable to use ordinary language with any precision and who walked about in a horrible blizzard of peculiar superlatives and meaningless coinages from which they tried to shelter themselves by a wild flailing of their hands.

The polyglot is a linguistic nomad.

For if men needed speech in order to learn to think, they had a still greater need for knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speaking - Rousseau

If people take seriously doctrines such as the divinity of Christ, it is not primarily because they can treat them as if they were tidy conclusions to an argument, deductions from readily available evidence, but because – however obscurely they are grasped, however challenging the detail – they see that the language of doctrine holds together a set of intractably complex questions in a way that offers a coherent context for human living.

Escribir es algo más que eso, es urdir, tejer, zurcir palabras, no importa si es una receta médica o una pieza de ficción. La diferencia es que la ficción consume cuerpo y alma.

Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms. [Carnap's famous plea for tolerance to which W.V. Quine took exception.]

Wir werden einen Satz wie Die Welt ist die Selbstverwirklichung Gottes nicht widerlegen, indem wir etwa zu beweisen versuchen: Die Welt ist nicht die Selbstverwirklichung Gottes. Damit würden wir, wo die Metaphysiker den Bock melken, das Sieb unterhalten.

It isn't what you say so much. It's what you mean when you say it.

Words are the most powerful drug used by humankind.

I am by nature a dealer in words, and words are the most powerful drug known to humanity.

An increasing cackle of complaints, orders, and jests, and what to a European would have been bad language, came from behind the curtains. Here was evidently a woman used to command.

When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.

Now I see, however,'—he exhaled smoke slowly—'that it is with them as with all men—in certain matters they are wise, and in others most foolish. Very foolish it is to use the wrong word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence, how is the stranger to know that? He is more like to search truth with a dagger.

Very foolish it is to use the wrong word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence, how is the stranger to know that? He is more like to search truth with a dagger.

Las palabras constituyen la droga más potente que haya inventado la humanidad.

Two words breathed into the stables of a certain Cavalry Regiment will bring the men out into the streets with belts and mops and bad language; but a whisper of "Fore and Aft" will bring out this regiment with rifles.

Cuvintele sunt cel mai important drog utilizat de omenire.

Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians

We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another's light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.

Here below the surface one studies the depths of TO BE, as manifest in AM, IS, and ARE. And if you don't hold up your end of the conversation I may very well snap you in two.