Quotes About Language

Iqbal, using Urdu and also Persian, would be the poet of Islam rather than of India.

Caste taboos had been broken, and a measure of equality introduced. But they had also become a distinct community, which for writing used a new script called

Nursing a powerful drive, a daring leader who believed in God and his own destiny now bonded—through shared danger, a common language, and the breaking of caste barriers—with a Singh following where a majority, scholars tell us, were Jat clans who equated honour with revenge.

Thus Punjabi became the 'Sikh' language, Urdu the 'Muslim' language, and Hindi the 'Hindu' language. Language was uprooted from ground-level and tied to religion rather than to the varied people who spoke it, or the tract where it was spoken.

writing about something was not the moral equivalent of doing it

Writing is merely public speaking on paper, but to a much larger audience.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White

Keys to Great Writing by Stephen Wilbers

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words

In good writing, words become one with things.

Language is the archives of history…. Language is fossil poetry.

We die of words. We are hanged, drawn and quartered by dictionaries. We walk in the vale of shadows. It is an age of hobgoblins.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Thought is the blossom language the bud action the fruit behind it.

La luna es un banco de metáforas arruinado.

Naturally, national unity and linguistic diversity have not always been seen to be compatible. Indians speaking one tongue have fought with Indians who speak another.

and Bengali literature – in sum, 'an awesome polyglot, the

The evolution of language marked a great leap forward for our species. It boosted our cognitive abilities by webbing us together into larger, more powerful group minds. I believe that another quantum step in human cognition awaits us on the other side of direct linkage of our brains and minds to one another." - Somdet Phra Ananda

Words. And meaning. You can't own one and not the other.