Language Quotes
The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.Lewis Thomas
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.George Santayana
Ours is the age of substitutes instead of language, we have jargon instead of principles, slogans and instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.Eric Bentley
A different language is a different vision of life.Federico Fellini
Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer. Be what you say; and, within the rules of prudence, say what you are.Alford
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.Vincent Van Gogh
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.Henry David Thoreau
Me, we. Supposedly the shortest quote in the English language delivered at a Harvard graduation.Muhammad Ali
We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.Joseph Roux
For the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies.Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.Larry Wall
I am is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that I do is the longest sentence?George Carlin
Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.Kahlil Gibran
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico - Philosophicus (1922)
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1882
Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.Rosenstock - Huessy
The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Language is a living, kicking, growing, flitting, evolving reality, and the teacher should spontaneously reflect its vibrant and protean qualities.John A. Rassias
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.Samuel Johnson
What is important - what lasts - In another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.Peter Brodie
Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.Robert E. Lee
Music is the soul of language.Max Heindel
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.Mark Twain
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.Samuel Johnson
Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more, you should never wish to do less.General Robert E. Lee
Whoever has the greatest command of the language, holds the power.Susan Johnson
Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.Mark Hopkins, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.Doug Larson
If you had the seeds of pestilence in your body you would not have a more active contagion that you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.Horace Bushnell
By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.William Carlos Williams
Perhaps of all the creations of man, language is the most astonishing.Gyles Lytton Sitrachy
We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language.... We have affection We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a common goal of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.Mark Twain
Sick I am of idle words, past all reconciling, Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel.George Du Maurie
I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the other considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me the quite a nice compliment - - But if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment. A Tramp Abroad, 1880.Mark Twain
