Language Quotes

Similes are like songs of love: They much describe they nothing prove.

A language is a dialect with its own army and navy.

Some words are like the old Roman galleys large-scaled and ponderous. They sit low in the water even when their cargo is light.

Words like eyeglasses blur everything that they do not make clear.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using now that everyone is using theirs?

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out communication is getting through.

Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

Like stones words are laborious and unforgiving and the fitting of them together like the fitting of stones demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression.

Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.

Man's command of the language is most important. Next to kissing it's the most exciting form of communication.

"Plain English" - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

Language is the armoury of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

Everyone hears only what he understands.

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.

Language most shows a man speak that I may see thee.

True eloquence consists of saying all that should be not all that could be said.

Even if language is a living evolving organism we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive it can get sick.

His words were softer than oil yet they were drawn swords.

Language is an inventory of human experience.

Change is legitimate and inevitable for our language is a mighty river picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there but growing ever wider and richer.

The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflation.

A word has its use Or like a man it will soon have a grave.

Every utterance is an event and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view therefore is that no word ever means the same thing twice.

It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed the deeper they burn.

If you can teach me a new word I'll walk all the way to China to get it.

I have always suspected that correctness is the last refuge of those who have nothing to say.

... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...

If you respect a language and culture, it shows in your work.

In this respect I suppose I'm the total opposite of Garry. With his very emotive body language at the board he shows and displays all his emotions. I don't.

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and smelly fish.

The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.

Before language, cavemen simply grunted, and then they used the club. Communication changed that. It's the mechanism that created civilization and prevents its own destruction.

Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs, riddles, or epics that are chanted.

'Arrival' talks very little about language and how to precisely dissect a foreign language. It's more a film on intuition and communication by intuition, the language of intuition.

Language cares.

Language is an inadequate form of communication. If you've picked up an instrument, it's because you don't feel you are communicating sufficiently.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

I think that what computers have done is just disastrous to the language.

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'

There's something about studying body language and non-spoken emotion - I know the innate response. But to really study it like a science would be fun.

I feel it is unnatural and immoral to try to teach science to children in a foreign language They will know facts, but they will miss the spirit.

When it comes to tyrants, dictators and terrorists, strength and the threat of force is the only language they understand.

I really never thought I was that good at film. And honestly still don't. My strength is language. My background is monologues and a certain kind of Brechtian spin on theater.

Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death.

Music is a language, you see, a universal language.

The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.