Quotes About Language

How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

Anyone that has come to America past the age of eighteen will be able to understand when I say that you can never shake your accent.

[T]hroughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive.... our word "school" - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure.

When I was old enough, I was 21 years of age, I decided to come to America. I did it illegally so I jumped the border. I didn't speak any English.

After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age.

Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

We're really all alone. We can't ever get inside another person's spirit, and see the world they do. So we are alone in that sense. The only way we have to communicate feelings is through words.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

It's amazing, the increase in grammatical errors in proportion to the level of hatred in the content of hate mail.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Did the poet use red to symbolize blood? Anger? Lust? Or is the wheelbarrow simply red because red sounded better than black?

a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life.

White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we finally had to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for customary indifference to utstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents.

As I look back over my work of several decades, I can see that the back-and-forth of my thoughts has hardly been graceful, as it is hardly graceful in these present pages. It will probably have to be seen as a struggle to find or recover the language necessary to speak, in the same breath, of work and love.

A well-made sentence, I think, is a thing of beauty.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato . In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

has sadly deprived our language of many of the fertile and resonant words which the Englishman of prior centuries had at his disposal. "Argufy" is one such; the dictionary defines it as "to argue or quarrel, typically about something trivial." Certainly we have all seen occasions where innocuous subjects are "argufied"; an

I have learned, over the years, to see the actions of our visitors as a sort of illustrative language, communication built out of images and events. For