Language Quotes

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1882
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
James Earl Jones
Language is a living, kicking, growing, flitting, evolving reality, and the teacher should spontaneously reflect its vibrant and protean qualities.
John A. Rassias
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.
Henry David Thoreau
We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.
Eric Hoffe
Our common language is... English. And our common task is to ensure that our non - English - Speaking children learn this common language.
William John Bennett
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity so have some little frocks but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Unknown - drawing on my fine command of language, i said...
Noam chomsky, ruth anshen, biography of an idea (mt. kisco, ny: moyer bell limited, 1986), pg. 196 - experience becomes possible because of language....
Me, we. Supposedly the shortest quote in the English language delivered at a Harvard graduation.
Muhammad Ali
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagne
Oliver wendell holmes - language is the blood of the soul into which...
When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly... I think - - Any fool can make a rule And every fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana
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
Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.
Field Marshall John French
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
Samuel Johnson
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
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Henry David Thoreau
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.
Galileo Galilei
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
No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.
Sam Rayburn
Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.
Samuel Johnson
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (1916) preface
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
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
Thought is the blossom language the bud action the fruit behind it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 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
The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence about language.
Henry David Thoreau
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
Dance is the hidden language of the soul.
Martha Graham
Do Not Disturb signs should be written in the language of the hotel maids.
Tim Bedore
To hate a man because he was born in another country, because he speaks a different language, or because he takes a different view of this subject or that, is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human... Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity.
John Comenius
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can read.
Mark Twain
Metric is definitely communist. One monetary system, one language, one weight and measurement system, one world - All communist! We know the West was won by the inch, foot, yard, and mile.
Dean Krakel, Director of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame
English is the easiest language to speak badly.
George Bernhard Shaw