Language Quotes

Death stands above me, whispering low I know not what into my ear; Of his strange language all I know Is, there is not a word of fear.

In prosperous times I have sometimes felt my fancy and powers of language flag, but adversity is to me at least a tonic and bracer.

Eugene Peterson's language makes the Bible exciting and strong, sweet, sharp, persuasive, painful, personal, contemporary, kind, and dramatic—and available to every reader of this age.

You don't actually have to understand the song to be emotionally moved and uplifted, whereas with language it becomes quirky and analytical.

I love music more than language: it's the best, it's universal.

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner.

I don't see poetry as something that has to do with too much emotion anyway. It has to do with language.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

Language is the spiritual exhalation of the nation.

The true language of commerce is the natural conversation between human beings.

Words are the weak support of cold indifference; love has no language to be heard.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.

English is a stretch language; one size fits all.

Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.

The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.

Ay, is it not a language I speak?

RUMOUR: "Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, The which in every language I pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.

Because French is the language of love, my boy. Something you should keep in mind, but will soon forget.

Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.

The choosing among words is made by every user of the language, and not exclusively by professional speakers and writers.

I was a comedian in Russia, and I worked on the cruise ships there. I met a lot of Americans, and they were laughing even though I didn't speak their language.

In the English language, I can love my car, or my house, or my daughter, or traveling, but in Greek and how I grew up, love is described with different words.

Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.

That is one more reason why I write in English only right now. I prefer writing in the language I hear around me for the people by whom I am surrounded.

I don't want to do an edgy show, I didn't want bad language. I think edginess is the new hackiness.

A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics.

Faeces by any other name would smell as gross

Her face looked for the answer that is always concealed in language.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

that your power of commandwith simple language wasone of the magnificent things ofour century.(from the poem: result)

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book, ' I said. He didn't hit me.

The name one gives is inessential.What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by other name would smell as sweet.

Language is fossil poetry

We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.

Language is insight itself.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

When I use a word, ’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.