Language Quotes - page 5

Language is a virus from outer space. (William S. Burroughs)

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

Edward Sapir

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

George Bernard Shaw

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

Stephen Fry

Language is a form of organized stutter.

Marshall McLuhan

Words should be employed as the means, not as the end: language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

Joshua Reynolds

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

Language transcends us and yet, we speak.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.

John Millington Synge

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

Thom Gunn

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought.... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. (Clarice Lispector)

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Jimmy Carter

Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace.

Margaret Drabble

The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.

Dorothy Parker

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Gaston Bachelard

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Gaston Bachelard

Ordinary language blinkers the already feeble imagination.

J. L. Austin

Philosophy is written in this grand book, which stands continually open before our eyes (I say the 'Universe'), but can not be understood without first learning to comprehend the language and know the characters as it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to humanly understand a word; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.

Galileo Galilei

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Don DeLillo

My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.

David Bohm

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence. (Joseph Roux)

The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.

Anish Kapoor

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

George Orwell

While I thought myself employed only in forming a nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.

Antoine Lavoisier

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Stephen King

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