Sunday, February 20, 2011

Quotes on Language


Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.  ~Julia Penelope

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.  ~Author Unknown

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.  ~Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907

One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.  ~Kevin Smith

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.  ~Jane Wagner

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.  ~Carl Sandburg, New York Times, 13 February 1959

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.  ~Marshall Lumsden

What words say does not last.  The words last.  Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.  ~Abigail Adams

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

If you can speak three languages you're trilingual.  If you can speak two languages you're bilingual.  If you can speak only one language you're an American.  ~Author Unknown

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.  ~Walter Kaufmann

The English language is nobody's special property.  It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.  ~Derek Walcott

Language is the dress of thought.  ~Samuel Johnson

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


Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.  ~William James

Be not the slave of Words.  ~Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book I, chapter 8

Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.  ~Mark Amidon

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.  ~Martin H. Fischer

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.  ~Alfred North Whitehead

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.  ~Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Note-Books

I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose.  I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries.  Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A different language is a different vision of life.  ~Federico Fellini

Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.  ~Author Unknown

Learn a new language and get a new soul.  ~Czech Proverb



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