Quotes About Language

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and houses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Literature is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or two

Language is fossil poetry

Y se expresaron con sus propias palabras, no con las palabras de los demás hombres

LANGUAGE is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle, and threefold degree.

Words so vascular and alive they would bleed if you cut them, words that walked and ran.

I found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard 'new things': that is, things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new."—Ouspensky

So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive

Giving yourself the privilege of destroying other positions while parking your own position in an unidentifiable location is a form of linguistic terrorism.

Culture is critical in marriage because in a real sense, culture is the behavioral expression of one's values, appreciations, tastes, and relational style in both simple and serious matters of life. Add to this the dimensions of language and cultural memory, and you have worlds within worlds. In effect, culture provides the how and why of an individual's behavior.

If you cannot understand me in my speech, how can you understand me in my silence?

Without words life would be inexpressible. Even the best of emotions beg for a verbal expression. That is why the musician reaches not just to the melody but to the romance of language to bring harmony to life.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

Those women like to see their tongues dance.

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words.

The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.