Language Quotes

Only a novel... in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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

Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.

Keith Bostic

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.

Egyptian Inscription Recorded at the Time of the Invention of Writing

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Scratch, 1988

Whoever said Marriage is a 5 - 5 proposition laid the foundation for more divorce fees than any other short sentence in our language.

Austin Elliot

BASIC - A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company.

Anon.

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

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

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

We are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencranz And Guildenstern Are Dead

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

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

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

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

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

James Grover Thurbe