Quotes About Language

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon. It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told. It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know. It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

I am reminded again that the greatest phrase ever written is words, words, words.

Human language is too poor to express the real nature of the Absolute Truth or Ultimate Reality which is Nirvana. Language is created and used by masses of human beings to express things and ideas experienced by their sense organs and their mind. A supramundane experience like that of the Absolute Truth is not of such a category. Therefore there cannot be words to express that experience, just as the fish had no words in his vocabulary to express the nature of the solid land.

The name one gives is inessential. What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by other name would smell as sweet.

Words are symbols representing things and ideas known to us; and these symbols do not and cannot convey the true nature of even ordinary things. Language is considered deceptive and misleading in the matter of understanding of the Truth.

Words are symbols representing things and ideas known to us; and these symbols do not and cannot convey the true nature of even ordinary things.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Words! book-words! what are you?

The great breeding people have gone out and multiplied ; colonies in every clime attest our success; French is the patois of Europe; English is the language of the world.

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency.

In continental language, Lombard Street is an organization of credit, and we are to see if it is a good or bad organization in its kind, or if, as is most likely, it turn out to be mixed, what are its merits and what are its defects?

Not to be too dogmatic, I don't believe there is anything such thing as free verse, as long as the poet is using language, the poet can't break enough rules to escape and still be understood.

Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

I had come for certitude, but the poetic speech does not give certitude.

My judgment is that as long as the pastors of the church are embarrassed by this urgent language to God and assume in our Enlightenment model that such rhetoric has no actual force, we will not get very far in the struggle for justice.

It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology

For if I when I speak am unable to make myself intelligible, then I am not speaking - even though I were to talk uninterruptedly day and night...Therein lies the distress and anguish.

Es ist wie bei einem gedruckten Satz: Er besteht aus lauter verschieden aussehenden Buchstaben, die scheinbar willkürlich durcheinanderstehen. Aber trotzdem kann man ihn lesen! Und er ergibt einen Sinn. Man kann sogar drüber lachen, wenn er komisch ist. So funktioniert Buchhaim. Das ist Biblionismus.

Etwas Einmaliges, etwas Unvergängliches formte sich in meinem Kopf. Ein kunstvolles Gebilde aus Worten und Sätzen, das sich wie eine außerirdische Kreatur von fremdartiger Schönheit in meinem Denken materialisierte - und zu mir sprach, in makellosen Versen! Es was ein Gedicht. Es hatte nicht das Geringste mit meinem eigenen Denken zu tun, es waren Gedanken aus dem All! Ein Geschenk der Sterne!

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.