LANGUAGE QUOTES IV
quotations about language
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
Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other.
PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE
Letters Written by the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son
Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee; it springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech.
BEN JONSON
Timber: Or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter
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
Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.
HAROLD PINTER
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 2005
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.
KARL MARX
The German Ideology
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET
The Blacks
A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Day's Collacon
We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Falling Through Space
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
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
CONFUCIUS
The Analects
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
Speech is the best show a man puts on.
BENJAMIN LEE WHORF
Language, Thought and Reality
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
GEORGE ORWELL
The English People
Perhaps the sad and empty language that today's flabby humanity pours forth, will, in all its horror, in all its boundless absurdity, re-echo in the heart of a solitary man who is awake, and then perhaps that man, suddenly realizing that he does not understand, will begin to understand.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
The Confession
Language is a living original; it is not made but grows. The growth of language repeats the growth of the plant; at first it is only root, next it puts forth a stem, then leaves, and finally blossoms.
WILLIAM SWINTON
Rambles Among Words: Their Poetry, History and Wisdom
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
PABLO NERUDA
The Book of Questions
In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned.
RICHARD DUPPA
Maxims
The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Essays
Language is an art, and a glorious one, whose influence extends over all others, and in which all science whatever must center; but an art springing from necessity, and originally invented by artless men.
J. H. TOOKE
attributed, Day's Collacon