Quotes About Language

Words are important for the mind, but the notes are for the soul.

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Science in the modern world has many uses its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

In making sense of what you say, in appreciating your jokes, in unmasking your chess-stratagems, in following your arguments and in hearing you pick holes in my arguments, I am not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them. Of course, I am not merely hearing the noises that you make, or merely seeing the movements that you perform. I am understanding what I hear and see. But this understanding is not inferring to occult causes.

For the reason, or maxim, is inevitably a proposition of some generality. It cannot embody specifications to fit every detail of the particular state of affairs.

desk simply to say: "Would you be willing to be parachuted into Greece next week?"' Woodhouse thought about it for a moment. 'There seemed no reason to say No, so I said Yes.'5 He reasoned that it would be a good opportunity to practise his Greek.

Algerian-born writer Albert Camus elegantly expressed this notion in the famous quotation, "Ma patrie, c'est la langue française" ("My homeland is the French language").

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

Because the construction of meaning requires many kinds of integration networks in addition to simplex networks, a great deal of semantics falls outside the realm of symbolic logic.

Because linguistic expressions prompt for meanings rather than represent meanings, linguistic systems do not have to be, and in fact cannot be, analogues of conceptual systems. Prompting for meaning construction is a job they can do; representing meanings is not.

That is not the case. We do not blame words for being insufficient to express new ideas.

the workers were careful when handling oil drums marked as "full." However, workers happily smoked in rooms that stored drums marked "empty." The reason? The word "empty" in English is associated with "nothing"; it seems boring, dull, and easy to ignore. However, "empty" oil drums are actually full of flammable fumes.

Good evening England. This is Gillie Potter speaking to you in English.

For her uncles, she realizes, it is as if ever since she left the country for New York City—for nothing! not to send money home but just to "galavant!"—ever since she left she has relinquished her right to her memory of home, and she should not be left to her devices or she will bumble through the nation like a witless tourist who cannot speak its languages, though in fact she code-switches in three of them, puns in five, makes money in two, and dreams in one.

Given that the shared understanding of truth has been central to language, religion and society, when we ignore small lies, we inflict damage on the larger truth. This is not holiness we're talking about, but wholeness and integrity.

Words can be as irrevocable as an action. They can cut as deeply as a surgeon's scalpel.

There are too few words for who and what human beings are to each other. Language is a territory still mostly uncharted. We are the cartographers, every day, still mapping the human heart.

As a baby, you saw reality clearly; however, you had no way of organizing and understanding what you saw. As you developed, language gave you a way of organizing the massive amounts of data that your senses delivered to your brain. Language also gave you a way to communicate with others. It allowed you to form relationships, survive, and carry out tasks in the world. What a miracle and gift language is!

In his head he felt the confused whirling of images seeking a name. Words, sounds, surged up inside him, clean and clear, and settled on everything around him. He named, and saw what he named recognize itself.

Que haya palabra y se vea su silencio, y, en este silencio, aparezca por un instante la cosa restituida a su anonimato, al no tener todavía o ya no tener nombre.

Ello no significa, sin embargo, que la escritura filosófica deba ser poética sino que sobre todo debe contener las huellas de una escritura poética que se desvanece, debe exhibir de algún modo el retiro de la poesía.

I have always understood that there is a kind of philosophical language which is only accessible to special philosophers

the line of mathematical imagination and that of philological critique seem to have faced each other in mutual incomprehension through the centuries