Language Quotes

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
Lewis Thomas
Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran
We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or explore. All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.
Ellen Gilcrist
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
George Bernard Shaw
Language study is a route to maturity. Indeed, in language study as in life, if a person is the same today as he was yesterday, it would be an act of mercy to pronounce him dead and to place him in a coffin, rather than in a classroom.
John A. Rassias
Language is a living, kicking, growing, flitting, evolving reality, and the teacher should spontaneously reflect its vibrant and protean qualities.
John A. Rassias
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
Noam chomsky, ruth anshen, biography of an idea (mt. kisco, ny: moyer bell limited, 1986), pg. 196 - the structure of language determines not only...
Noam chomsky, ruth anshen, biography of an idea (mt. kisco, ny: moyer bell limited, 1986), pg. 196 - experience becomes possible because of language....
Language is the dress of thought.
Samuel Johnson
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Nelson Mandela
Chinese prove - a filthy mouth will not utter decent language....
We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
Henry David Thoreau
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana
Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists though their field - work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
Robert Graves
Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.
Rosenstock - Huessy
Accent is the soul of language it gives to it both feeling and truth.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.
Larry Wall
High thoughts must have high language.
Aristophanes, Frogs, 405 B. C.
If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.
Doug Larson
Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.
Robert E. Lee
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
Christopher Morley
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
Doug Larson
We can lie in the language of dress or try ot tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.
Alison Lurie
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
BASIC - A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company.
Anon.
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can read.
Mark Twain
Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.
Mark Hopkins, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language.... We have affection We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a common goal of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.
Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the other considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me the quite a nice compliment - - But if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment. A Tramp Abroad, 1880.
Mark Twain
Only a novel... in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations
A different language is a different vision of life.
Federico Fellini
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.
Johnson
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body.
Martha Graham
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
Robert Benchley
The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence about language.
Henry David Thoreau
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Max Weinreich