Quotes About Language

The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive.

He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth.

sesquipedalian

It's a pity we don't whistle at one another, like birds. Words are misleading. I am always trying to forget words. That is why I contemplate the lilies of the field, but in particular the glacier. If one looks at the glacier for long enough, words cease to have any meaning on God's earth.

De ins en de outs er dat kinder talk all come ter de same p'int in my min'.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language. — Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy (Scribner, 1999)

What idiots we were! How misinformed! Why didn't we understand that we were happily condemning ourselves to being nothing better than motor-mechanics? Why couldn't we see that? For Eleanor's crowd hard words and sophisticated ideas were in the air they breathed from birth, and this language was the currency that bought you the best of what the world could offer. But for us it could only ever be a second language, consciously acquired.

The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, normal knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for language rules.

C'est par le verbe et l'acte que nous nous insérons dans le monde humain, et cette insertion est comme une seconde naissance dans laquelle nous confirmons et assurons le fait brut de notre apparition physique originelle .

Words used for the purpose of fighting lose their quality of speech; they become clichés. The extent to which clichés have crept into our everyday language and discussions may well indicate the degree to which we not only have deprived ourselves of the faculty of speech, but are ready to use more effective means of violence than bad books (and only bad books can be good weapons) with which to settle our arguments.

The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.

businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and "thought in continents

Nothing we see or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given to the senses. Hegel was right when he pointed out that "the This of sense . . . cannot be reached by language"8 Was it not precisely the discovery of a discrepancy between words, the medium in which we think, and the world of appearances, the medium in which we live, that led to philosophy and metaphysics in the first place?

est, sans conteste, la tonalité absolument dominante

Sólo se puede confiar en las palabras si uno está seguro de que su función es revelar y no ocultar.

Nothing expressed in words can ever attain to the immobility of an object of contemplation. Compared to the latter, meaning, which can be said and spoken about, is slippery; if the philosopher wants to see and grasp it, it slips away.

Vernunft (reason) is traced back to its origin in the verb vernehmen (to perceive, to hear)

Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.

The fact that the word revolution originally meant restoration is more than a mere oddity of semantics.

Superbe! Charmant! exclaimed the ladies; for they all used to chatter French, each one worse than her neighbor.

language, which he had learnt from his mother. The corn-fields and meadows were surrounded by large forests, in the midst

The stork walking about on his long red legs chattered in the Egyptian language, which he had learnt from his mother. The corn-fields and meadows were surrounded by large forests, in the midst of which were deep pools.

Es handelte sich also nur um Grammatik und nicht um Liebe.

Myron shook his head. All sports have their own lexicons, but speaking golfese was tantamount to mastering Swahili. It was like rich people's rap. But