Language Quotes

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

A man who does not know foreign language is ignorant of his own.

Johann von Goethe

The two most beautiful words in the English language are ``check enclosed.'

Dorothy Parke

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

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

A filthy mouth will not utter decent language.

Chinese Prove

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can read.

Mark Twain

Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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 blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Mark Twain

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Samuel Johnson

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Doug Larson

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.

Sam Rayburn

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

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

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

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

In human relations a little language goes farther than a little of almost anything else. Whereas one language now often makes a wall, two can make a gate.

Walter V. Kaulfers, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations

I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.

Lily Tomlin

Music is the last true voice of the human spirit. It can go beyond language, beyond age, and beyond color straight to the mind and heart of all people.

Ben Harpe

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

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Scratch, 1988

Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body.

Martha Graham

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

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

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

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.

Galileo Galilei

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Samuel Johnson

Have the wild things no moral or legal rights? What right has man to inflict such long and fearful agony on a fellow creature, simply because that creature does not speak his language?

Ernest Thompson Seton

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.

Doug Larson

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)

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.

Kahlil Gibran

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

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

Music is the soul of language.

Max Heindel