LANGUAGE QUOTES IV
quotations about language
In general the languages of most unpolished people have a great force and energy of expression; and this is but natural. Uncultivated people are but ordinary observers of things, and not critical in distinguishing them; but, for that reason, they admire more, and are more affected with what they see, and therefore express themselves in a warmer and more passionate manner.
EDMUND BURKE
Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
MURIEL BARBERY
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.
KARL MARX
The German Ideology
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
"On Language", The American Democrat
To clothe low-creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy but flat foolery; it rather loads than raises a wren, to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.
THOMAS FULLER
The Holy State and the Profane State
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
STEPHEN HAWKING
British Telecom advertisement, 1993
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
PABLO NERUDA
The Book of Questions
If the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now -- well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.
MAX VENTILLA
"Learn Different: Silicon Valley disrupts education", The New Yorker, March 7, 2016
We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Language is considered by some to be the distinguishing characteristic of humanity. No other animal is capable of the kind of linguistic complexity in sound, grammar, and meaning as humans. With well over one million words in the English language alone, this makes the range of our possible expression incalculably large. Many of the sentences you compose in your day-to-day conversations may never have been said before. Ever.
NICOLA BROWN
"How Language Complexity Invalidates a Formulaic Content Approach", Skyword, April 1, 2016
At the end of the day, good language is bold language.
FRANCESCO CLEMENTE
"Pamela Love and Francesco Clemente Reflect on Decades of Collaboration", Vogue, April 4, 2016
Language was invented for one reason, boys -- to woo women.
N. H. KLEINBAUM
Dead Poets Society
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
MARK TWAIN
Innocents Abroad
A language has very little that is arbitrary in it, very little betokening the conscious power and action of man. It owes its origin, not to the thoughts and the will of individuals, but to an instinct actuating a whole people: it expresses what is common to them all: it has sprung out of their universal wants, and lives in their hearts. But after a while in intellectual aristocracy come forward, and frame a new language of their own. The princes and lords of thought shoot forth their winged words into regions beyond the scan of the people. They require a gold coinage, in addition to the common currency.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
A country without a language is a country without a soul.
ELIZABETH GREIWE
"The luck of the Irish language student", Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2016
The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved; it has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which unless fixed and arrested might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing as the lightning.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
On the Study of Words
Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.
EDWARD HIRSCH
How to Read a Poem