Language Quotes
We are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.Tom Stoppard, Rosencranz And Guildenstern Are Dead
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
Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.Henry James
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
Dance is the hidden language of the soul.Martha Graham
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.Samuel Johnson
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagne
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
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
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
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.Robert Benchley
He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.Benjamin Franklin
England and America are two countries seperated by the same language.George Bernard Shaw
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.Carl Sandburg, New York Times Feb. 13, 1959
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
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
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.William Butler Yeats
Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.John Erskine
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
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.William Osle
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
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1882
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.George Orwell
Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit.Jeremy Taylo
Reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.Unknown
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
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
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.George Bernard Shaw
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.Alexander Solzhenitsyn
For the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies.Alfred, Lord Tennyson
If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.Doug Larson
One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German Ideology, Chapter 3
Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.Mark Hopkins, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
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
Do Not Disturb signs should be written in the language of the hotel maids.Tim Bedore
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
I am is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that I do is the longest sentence?George Carlin
