quotations about language
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Letters and Social Aims
The enterprise of describing something in language that has never been described before is a very difficult thing to do. When you decide to do away with old cliches or old phraseologies, and to come up with a new way of saying something, it's extremely difficult.
GAO XINGJIAN
"A Conversation with Gao Xingjian", Asia Society
There is a tradition of writers trying to escape their language and render their art in a foreign tongue. Some do it because they are intoxicated by the possibilities offered in a new language--the words and turns of phrase for which their own language doesn't have any equivalents, the strange new rhythms and patterns of sound.
E. W.
"Why do writers abandon their native language?", The Economist, March 14, 2016
Without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?
MELINA MARCHETTA
Finnikin of the Rock
I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
letter to J.P., Sep. 28, 1932
Language is such a pervasive feature of being a human being that when you can't talk anymore, people find it very frightening, even if your other cognitive features are pretty much intact. People see it as, you must have a lot of other things wrong with you.
AUDREY HOLLAND
"Aphasia is a little-known, yet growing, health problem", Philly, March 26, 2016
I don't speak ... I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
We might knit that knot with our tongues that we shall never undo with our teeth.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.
TONI MORRISON
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1993
Speech is the small change of Silence.
GEORGE MEREDITH
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies. The ruthless and cynical mutilation and degradation of human beings, both in spirit and body, the death of countless thousands -- these actions are justified by rhetorical gambits, sterile terminology and concepts of power which stink. Are we ever going to look at the language we use, I wonder? Is it within our capabilities to do so?
HAROLD PINTER
"Oh, Superman", Opinion, May 31, 1990
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Sartor Resartus
It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.
EDMUND BURKE
Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Neither rings, bright chains, nor bracelets, perfumes, flowers, nor well-trimmed hair, Grace a man like polished language, th' only jewel he should wear.
BHARTRHARI
"The Praise of the Wise Man"
Even if the Florida State Senate has recently ruled that studying computer code is equivalent to learning a foreign language, the two could not be more different. Programming is a constructed, formal language. Italian, Russian or Chinese -- to name a few of the estimated 7,000 languages in the world -- are natural, breathing languages which rely as much on social convention as on syntactic, phonetic or semantic rules.
DAVID ARBESÚ
"Could the language barrier actually fall within the next 10 years?", The Conversation, March 28, 2016
Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Philosophy of Style
Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
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.
JOSE SARAMAGO
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis