Quotes About Language

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

GENEROUS, adj. Originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.

Every name is real. That's the nature of names.

There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.

All truth has to be expressed in sentences... the type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning.

A poet is the translator of the silent language of nature to the world.

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.'

Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.

When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.

French is a foreign language, but I've been speaking it since I was 18 so it's second nature to me.

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything.

Nature alone can speak to our intelligence an imperishable language, never changing, because it remains within the bounds of eternal truth and of what is absolutely noble and beautiful.

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.