Language Quotes

My language! heavens!I am the best of them that speak this speech. Were I but where 'tis spoken.

Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.

I’m saying language is a passport. A dubious, dangerous passport too.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.

Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

The tongue of man is a twisty thing.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.

The four sweetest words in the English language — 'You wore me down.'

Whenever I've been bitten, it's because I made a mistake. I either misread the dog's body language or let my guard down at the wrong time.

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

However well you know the French language you've learnt it the wrong way, not as a native speaker would. That's my problem as well.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

If you don't know foreign languages, you don't know anything about your own.

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.

The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language.

It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.

My feeling is, music is a more eloquent international language than Coca-Cola or McDonalds.

If you loose the sounds comming out of New Orleans, you loose apart of the american language.

I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

Actually, my correspondent's language is better than mine. He can put his sentiment into words.

Church reminded me very much of going to shul. It was a bunch of men wearing long robes, speaking in a language I didn't understand.

If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language.

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language

When I was younger, I used to hate Germany. I hated the country, the people, the language, the culture, everything! But over the years I've grown to really appreciate the German people.

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

It makes no sense to bad mouth people, but I think Jean-Luc Godard is astonishing as a survivalist, somebody who can do a film that is as extraordinary as Goodbye to Language.

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

Latin! The language of God! Or perhaps He speaks Hebrew? I suppose that's more likely and it will make things rather awkward in heaven, won't it? Will we all have to learn Hebrew?

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Fatherhood is helping your children learn English as a foreign language.

The world needs more Edwin Morgans, people who can take the language and swing it round their heads and don't care what you think.

Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose.

Poems are language turned into art; sound and sense matter; they can be as long or longer than The Odyssey or as short or shorter than a haiku. Not very helpful.

Should, is the worst word in the English language. People always think things "should" be a certain way, and when they're not, they're disappointed.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

Before we got engaged, he never farted. Now it's a second language.

Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.