Quotes About Language

El primer humano que insultó a su enemigo en vez de tirarle una piedra fue el fundador de la civilización

Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.

This reliance on puns gives Freud an interpretative freedom which might often be considered licence.

most people report dreaming principally in visual images. Freud, however, assumes that dreams start from a dream-thought that is best expressed in words and translate it into a picture-language which is intellectually inferior because it cannot convey logical connections; the analyst restores to the dream its verbal character.

Freud revelled in linguistic play, but, despite his appreciation of painting and especially sculpture, he did not know what to make of visual imagery in dreams.

Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.

Les mots provoquent des émotions et constituent pour les hommes le moyen général de s'influencer réciproquement.

In language differing only slightly from current psychoanalytic terminology, Crawley declared that each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation... a narcissism of minor differences.

If we could talk to animals, goes the song. Meaning, if they could talk to us. But of course that would ruin everything.

No matter how hard we try to put the most important things into words, it is always like toe-dancing in clogs.

This would explain much of human suffering, according to my ex, who was being less playful than you might think. He really did believe that's how it was: each of us languaging on, our meaning clear to ourselves but to nobody else. Even people in love? I asked, smilingly, teasingly, hopefully. This was at the very beginning of our relationship. He only smiled back. But years later, at the bitter end, came the bitter answer: People in love most of all. —

In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren't often fists.

Find the right tone and you can write about anything

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does.

At times I can barely contain my anger at students. How can you be an English major and not know that you don't put a period after a question mark? Why do even graduate students not know the difference between a novel and a memoir, and why do they keep referring to full-length books as "pieces"?

It was as if I had been mute all my life and only now had discovered what words sounded like.

literature is but the shadow of good talk

To utter a word and meaning nothing by it is unworthy of a philosopher. Berkeley

Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful.

in Czech we have an expression, propadnout lásce, to fall in love. You can't do that in German, can you? In German you just come into love. But in Czech you can fall into it.

Problém se slovy spo?ívá v tom, že stahují myÅ¡lenky k zemi, pÃ…â"¢ibíjejí je na kÃ…â"¢íž pÃ…â"¢esných význam?. Ale život není o pÃ…â"¢esných významech, spíÅ¡e o jejich odstínech, o náznacích, verzích a rozporech, o propojení lásky a nenávisti, vypo?ítavosti a touhy.

I still cannot define a noun, let alone a definite or indefinite article, or an objective personal pronoun. I rely on spell-check to guide my use of 'to' or 'too'. Does it matter? Colleagues said to me: 'If you want to write, just get on and write. Don't wait for a qualification.

God is the finger; God is writing; God, is above all else, words.

impenetrability of the Navajo code was all down to the fact that Navajo belongs to the Na-Dene family of languages, which has no link with any Asian or European language.