Quotes About Language

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one.

A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place." We're

The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

It means that language can make worlds that don't and could never exist.

Language is a meaning approximator that sometimes gets too big for its britches and deceives us

Language, like algebra, operates usefully only within certain limits. It's a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world itself.

Isn't it interesting that—in the English language, at least—there's a word for making things simple ("simplification" or "simplify"), but no word for making things easy or fun.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

Too often, to speak is to "get it wrong.

After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since).

El escritor de hoy tiende a usar cada vez menos palabras y cada vez más simples, tanto porque la cultura de masas ha diluido el concepto de cultura literaria como porque la suma de realidades que el lenguaje podía expresar de forma necesaria y suficiente ha disminuido de manera alarmante.

George Steiner

Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.

George Steiner

Only language knows no conceptual, no projective finality.

any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, . . . any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is . . . underwritten by the assumption of God's presence.

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation (onomatopoeia), has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

Los idiolectos del pensamiento, las privacidades de lo no dicho son de un orden mucho más profundo e inalcanzable.

Tot ceea ce putem spune despre limb?, ca ÅŸi despre moarte este, într- un anumit sens, un adev?r inaccesibil.

No hay lenguas pequeñas. no existen sintaxis primitivas. Cada lengua, sabemos, genera y articula una visión del mundo, una narrativa del destino humano, una construcción de futuribles de la cual no hay facsímil en ninguna otra. —

Amigo! Amigo! (Calling out to the ITALLIAN Prime minister....)

To put it more precisely, since language is by definition the expression of civilised man, violence is silent. Civilisation and language grew as though violence was something outside. But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence.