Quotes About Language

Harlekine versprechen nichts, Maya thought in German. Harlequins don't promise.

Sokolov paused, trying to find words to describe a sensation that is essentially indescribable. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas could have helped him here: on the African savanna, she explains in The Tribe of Tiger , when thunder rolls, lions will roar back. What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

Words, words, just stupid words. Listen to your body. Listen to your heart.

Titanides were masters of song. Their whole language was song; music was as important to them as food.

Our speech is not as yours, nor our pipes so deep.

The English language was a delight to them, so illogical and fertile and well-suited to their natural desire to confuse, obfuscate, and generally side-step clear meaning whenever possible.

It is only proper to realize that language is largely a historical accident.

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language truly used by the central nervous system.

If things had started over a misunderstanding, some language barrier or even a dramatic physical difference, he might've forgiven some of the things they did. But the way they acted made it clear they not only didn't care about anyone else, but they also relished the horrors they committed. Is that how they keep score within their social structure?

Simplicity may be simple, but like complexity it requires linguistic precision, and may therefore call for relatively obscure expressions at times.

How strange a thing this art of writing did seem at it's first invention, we may guess by late discovered Americans, who were amazed to see men Converse with books, and could scarce make themselves to believe that a paper could speak..

Rome is not eternal; it does not matter. Rome will fall; it does not matter. The barbarian will conquer; it does not matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will not wholly die; the barbarian will become the Rome he conquers; the language will smooth his rough tongue; the vision of what he destroys will flow in his blood. And in time that is ceaseless as this salt sea upon which I am so frailly suspended, the cost is nothing, is less than nothing.

he felt the logic of grammar, and he thought he perceived how it spread out from itself, permeating the language and supporting human thought.

There is so much that is not said. I almost believe that the form has not been devised that will let me say what I need to say.

If I were asked to answer, in one sentence, the question 'What was Wittgenstein's biggest contribution to philosophy', I should answer 'His asking of the question "Can one play chess without the Queen?

Wisdom is made up of ten parts—nine of which are silence, and the tenth is brevity of language. A

Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don't get the value of their stuff across—not so much because they're over their audience's heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it's all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk.

You don't seriously suggest that thet're talking when they make that rattling noise.

We are not shut away into individual cages from which we can reach out only with inadequate words.

There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.

But he survived, that radio announcer. His ship and five others out of the flotilla of ten came through, a bit radioactive, but otherwise unharmed. And I understand that the first thing that happened to him when he reported back to his office after treatment was a reprimand for the use of overcolloquial language which had given offense to a number of listeners by its neglect of the Third Commandment.

You should understand that I did not want you to read a painting. I/ wanted you to bathe in it before words domesticated the experience,/ and you turned to such stand-bys as "illumination" and "transcendent"/ to describe what happened to you. Painting should not be sentenced to/ sentences.

I have also paid some attention to what language can tell us. Messages perish as they are uttered, but language itself is remarkably durable. Sometimes it preserves useful clues to a more abstract and thought-oriented part of the human past than material artifacts do.

Words, as. it happens, sometimes survive the millennia better than material objects, and they do so best in areas in which the culture changed only very slowly - as in the far north, where the intense winter cold discouraged immigrants.