Quotes About Language

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

For rhyme the rudder is of verses, With which like ships they steer their courses.

Words are hoops Through which to leap upon meanings, Which are horses' backs, Bare, moving.

The night Hath been to me a more familiar face Than that of man; and in her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness I learned the language of another world.

Joe had always considered individual words as finite unites of currency, and he believed in savings. He never wanted to waste or unnecessarily expends words. To Joe, words meant things. They should be spent wisely.

Language has shaped our expectations so extensively that real reality has become the most detached and incomprehensible one of all.

Él obraba cuando todos dormían, lo que en una imperceptible torsión gramatical podía significar que su obra era el sueño.

Los madrugadores afantasmaban, todo en silencio, como si el lenguaje no se hubiera inventado todavía, ateridos, mojados.

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.

You don't have good grammar when you type with your fists.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

even a question can be a lie if asked in the right way.

When any new language design project is nearing completion, there is always a mad rush to get new features added before standardization. The rush is mad indeed, because it leads into a trap from which there is no escape. A feature which is omitted can always be added later, when its design and its implications are well understood. A feature which is included before it is fully understood can never be removed later.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it. Our applications are complex because we are ambitious to use our computers in ever more sophisticated ways. Programming is complex because of the large number of conflicting objectives for each of our programming projects. If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

Why do airline pilots always call passengers "folks"? I don't usually take umbrage at generic terminology--I'm one of those forward-thinkers who believes that "man" encompasses the whole darned race -- but at whatever 0'clock in the mornning. I thought it would be nice to be called sometihng that suggested unwashed masses a little less.

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas; it even seems as if the unconscious had a way of strangling the physician in the coils of his own theory.

You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language.

Men were not as yet possessed of that distrust of language which animates us moderns and frequently causes us to see in words a far from adequate expression of the facts. On the contrary, there was a simple and unsuspecting faith that the range of an idea and the range of the word roughly corresponding to it must in every case exactly coincide.18

The mouth utters the word, the sign, and the symbol. If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. When the way enters death and we are surround by rot and horror, the way rises in the darkness and leaves the mouth as the saving symbol, the word.

The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.

Speech is generated by the intellect and in turn generates intellect.

Language must be taken in a wider sense than speech, for speech is only the outward flow of thoughts formulated for communication