Language Quotes
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagne
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.Noah Webste
The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.J. Michael Straczynski
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.Johnson
The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.Ernest Hemingway
The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.Noam Chomsky, Ruth Anshen, Biography of an Idea (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1986), pg. 196
Dance is the hidden language of the soul.Martha Graham
A man who does not know foreign language is ignorant of his own.Johann von Goethe
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.Ludwig Wittgenstein
When thoughts fails of words, they find imagination waiting at their elbow to teach a new language without words.Author Unknown
No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.Sam Rayburn
We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.Eric Hoffe
Thought is the blossom language the bud action the fruit behind it.Ralph Waldo Emerson
The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.Larry Wall
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.Max Weinreich
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.Johann von Goethe
We can lie in the language of dress or try ot tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.Alison Lurie
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.Mark Twain
Neither can embellishments of language be found without arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the light of language.Cicero
Language is the dress of thought.Samuel Johnson
Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the ability to express oneself.Franz Xavier Kroetz
Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.Paul Johannes Tillich
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.Nelson Mandela
Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.John Erskine
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.Galileo Galilei
I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.Mario M Cuomo
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.Mark Twain
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.Christopher Fry
Experience becomes possible because of language.Noam Chomsky, Ruth Anshen, Biography of an Idea (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1986), pg. 196
Accent is the soul of language it gives to it both feeling and truth.Jean Jacques Rousseau
The most heroic word in all languages is revolution.Eugene Debs
Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably togethe.Clyde Kluckhohn
He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.Edward R. Murrow, On Winston Churchill, 1954
Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.H. Jackson Brown Jr.
The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Yes, we are all different. Different customs, different foods, different mannerisms, different languages, but not so different that we cannot get along with one another. If we will disagree without being disagreeable.J. Martin Kohe
