Quotes About Language

The universe, Galileo wrote, "is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single world of it." Without mathematics, he concluded, "one wanders about in a dark labyrinth"—or what Plato might have called a cave.

The language was also shamelessly intimate and earthy: passersby were addressed as "honey" and children as "little shits." They dubbed local landmarks Gallows Branch or Cutthroat Gap or Shitbritches Creek (in North Carolina). In Lunenberg County, Virginia, they even named two local streams Tickle Cunt Branch and Fucking Creek.

Aristotle and Plato would have dismissed this kind of obsequious language as unworthy of free men. By the seventeenth century, however, it had become commonplace. It was also a lie.

Some states banned the teaching of German in private and public schools alike.

South Dakota even prohibited the use of the German language over the telephone.

In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.

Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.

To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.

Because of the hand, the sign of the mano in fica. That gesture is now only used by Italians.

If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.

Empowerment comes from precision, precision, precision; from language that harpoons the exact meaning, the nuance, for the intended audience.

amazing became the It utterance of the millennium's first decade. Never were so many so amazed at so much that amounts to so little. If

Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O: vowels,Someday I shall recount your latent births.

Old poetics played a large part in my alchemy of the word.

Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu. Il est chargé de l'humanité, des animaux même ; il devra faire sentir, palper, écouter ses inventions ; si ce qu'il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne forme ; si c'est informe, il donne de l'informe. Trouver une langue ;

One should use common words to say uncommon things

Heaven would at once cease to be heaven if the ears of the saints still heard the blasphemous and filthy language of the reprobate.

a sea of matter in a drop of language" was regarded as the perfection of oratory.

The pronunciation of both Sami and Portuguese languages is strikingly similar: the Portuguese evolved from folksy Latin while the Sami evolved from reindeers' howling.

wymowa j?zyka saamskiego i portugalskiego jest zaskakuj?co podobna. J?zyk portugalski wywodzi si? przecie? z ludowej ?aciny, a saamski z porykiwania reniferów.

Es lo malo de estas guerras —va diciendo Olmos, a su espalda—. Que oyes al enemigo llamar a su madre en el mismo idioma que tú, y como que así, ¿no?… Se te enfrían las ganas.

en España nunca se dice lo que pasa, pero desgraciadamente siempre acaba pasando lo que se dice.

En aquel entonces, además de los bailes de salón que le servían para ganarse la vida —tango, foxtrot, boston—, dominaba como nadie el arte de crear fuegos artificiales con las palabras y dibujar melancólicos paisajes con los silencios.

Los españoles tuvieron una clara superioridad sobre los demás pueblos: su lengua se hablaba en París, en Viena, en Milán, en Turín; sus modas, sus formas de pensar y de escribir subyugaron a las inteligencias italianas, y desde Carlos V hasta el comienzo del reinado de Felipe III España tuvo una consideración de la que carecían los demás pueblos (VOLTAIRE).