Language Quotes

To generalize is to be an idiot, " said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.

exaggeration is the octopus of the English language

As with . . . even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life.

London is a language. I guess all places are.

(Rigg) had often complained that all these languages were useless, and Father had only said, "A man who speaks but one language understands none.

Language is the dress of thoughts.

Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.

When somebody speaks a language that we don’t know, we often imagine that some important things are being said!

For most people, language is our primary interface with each other and with the external world.

I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. ("Substitutions")

Simplicity may be simple, but like complexity it requires linguistic precision, and may therefore call for relatively obscure expressions at times.

Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.

There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.

It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.

Having words opened up a world of possibilities for Martha.

Words are such fun!

Language itself is a major resource in the naming of what cannot be named

Languages are not strangers to on another.

We can only think in a language that we master.

Your language indicates──and limits──what you think.

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.

In future, brainwave is a media of universal language.

I did not foresee my words becoming such a reverie of mimic and refrain.

Weber sandstone a billion years old. This rock was Precambrian, I read, a term like postmodern, suggesting that what it names is so mysterious as to require identification by what it isn’t.

The arts vividly illustrate the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.

the most important things can't be lassoed with language. The most important things can only be felt.

Alan invented all sorts of ways of expressing things so that only he and I understood. He used language as a place for us to hide.

Where personal experience is concerned, we all speak a different language.

Death is only a translation of life into another language.

Our body talks to us, not in a language that you speak but the language that you feel

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.

Owning Languages, Owning identities.

Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.

Strong communicators increase their influence because they are intentional and focused with their language.

I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.

I dug her usage of "Spotify" as a verb.

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.

People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.

Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.

Uh, she said maybe your eyes matched the Fog like a synchronous magnetic field?” “I don’t even know what language that is.

By sabotaging logic, the common frame of reference, and the common language, we have removed a "safety valve" that allows cultural divides to be resolved.

before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signsthey enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an imageas much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

I know that language will be a crucial instrument, that I can overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouth.

a hymn then not to birds but to words which themselves feel like feather and wing and light, as if it were on the delicacy of such sweet syllables that flocks take flight.

Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.