Quotes About Language

It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case." --

The way in which we say something is often more important than what we say.

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is, until we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say, "I lost it.

When a man says "I know what I mean, but I can't express it," he generally does not know what he means—for there can be no knowledge without words; there can only be feelings.

Our speech accurately reflects the prejudices of the ruling group. Since the rulers and the rich and the educated (who directed language) generally lived in cities, we developed such words as "villain," which meant a rustic; "heathen" and "pagan," which also indicated those who dwelt in the country; "boor," which meant a farmer; and many other such words which downgraded rural inhabitants.

As the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen.

Something is wrong with a sentence when you can delete words and not sense the loss.

While architecture's sense of disciplinary inferiority ultimately derives from the antique pyramid of expression that placed language and poetry at its lofty apex and building down amid the mud and toil of the ground, architecture's Sisyphean effort to achieve elevation only became more futile with the development of modern capitalism on the one hand […] and avant-garde strategies of opposition on the other.

Let me never speak casually.

But words must be found, for besides words there is almost nothing.

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestleWith words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.… The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled usTo purify the dialect of the tribe.

More can be learned about how to write poetry from Dante than from any English poet…. The language of each great English poet is his own language; the language of Dante is the perfection of a common language.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

What a curious power words have.

Crematorium Esperanto is a language we can all learn. Dehumanization, as Borowski shows us, is a human process. The meaning of death is that we organize our actions around it. Fascism is not limited to a certain time and place; it is a certain orientation of life toward death. Extermination does not sanctify a victim or dignify a cause. It only instructs us about human possibility.

Bo aluzja jest swego rodzaju formÄ… sztuki. Aluzja to prawda ubrana w szatÄ™ metafory.

During sex it's perfectly fine to say "YEAH", "YES", and "OH YES", but how awkward would it be if someone kept screaming "YEP"?

People say I'm condescending. That means I talk down to people.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.

It is a mistake not to know any foreign language, and infinitely worse to have only a superficial knowledge of a foreign language.

All true communication, even between two people speaking the same language, requires translation," Genji said. "In the end, our hearts must hear what cannot be spoken.