Quotes About Language

Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.

Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss. This language is laden with future catastrophes. The day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.

For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

When we advance a little into life, we find that the tongue of man creates nearly all the mischief of the world.

Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.

Words . . . present a picture of the inward man.

There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live.

How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

Whatever your Bible translation is, it stands on the shoulders of one man - William Tyndale.

I can't tell a story in the white man's language, so I say what I want to say with my paintings.

Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.

Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness . . .

From the fruit of his lips a man enjoys good things.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

Women speak at an earlier age, more easily, and more agreeably than men; they are accused also of speaking more; this is as it should be, and I willingly change the reproach into a eulogy.

A man by tumbling his thoughts, and forming them into expressions, gives them a new fermentation, which works them into a finer body.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

A man who can speak two languages is worth two men.

We cling to words like drowning men to straws. But still we drown, we drown.