Language Quotes

Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably togethe.

Clyde Kluckhohn

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Scratch, 1988

Music is the soul of language.

Max Heindel

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.

Eric Hoffe

Me, we. Supposedly the shortest quote in the English language delivered at a Harvard graduation.

Muhammad Ali

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Paul Johannes Tillich

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Vincent Van Gogh

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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico - Philosophicus (1922)

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

Charles Scribner, Jr.

Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.

Egyptian Inscription Recorded at the Time of the Invention of Writing

Dance is the hidden language of the soul.

Martha Graham

He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

Benjamin Franklin

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

James Earl Jones

Whoever has the greatest command of the language, holds the power.

Susan Johnson

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.

Edward R. Murrow, On Winston Churchill, 1954

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

Ernest Hemingway

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagne