Language Quotes - page 3

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. (W. H. Auden)
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. View quote
Roland Barthes
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language. View quote
Samuel Johnson
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth. View quote
Antonin Artaud
All words, in every language, are metaphors. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain. View quote
Lily Tomlin
Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides. View quote
Rita Mae Brown
However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction. View quote
J. L. Austin
People who speak Belarusian can not do anything except talk on it, because it is impossible to express anything great in Belarusian. The Belarusian language is a poor language. There are only two great languages in the world. Russian and English. View quote
Alexander Lukashenko
The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. View quote
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. (George Orwell)
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. View quote
George Orwell
I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy. View quote
Bertrand Russell
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language. View quote
William Osler
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. View quote
José Saramago
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. View quote
Raymond Williams
Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden. View quote
Karl Kraus
Good music is very close to primitive language. View quote
Denis Diderot
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. View quote
George Steiner
To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language. (William Cullen Bryant)
Beware of exquisite language. The language should be simple and elegant. View quote
Anton Chekhov
Accent is the soul of language it gives to it both feeling and truth. View quote
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Finality is not the language of politics. View quote
Benjamin Disraeli
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge