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Quotation of the day
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Daily Quote:
"To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself." (Rice, Anne - Writers and Writing)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Language

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?
Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests
As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it: 'Tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.
How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.
I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.
I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?
If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.
If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.
It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.
It was Greek to me.
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
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.
Language is a virus from outer space.
Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.
Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic/ape/suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.
Language is the archives of history.
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Language is the dress of thought.
Language is the inventory of human experience.
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
Language is the pedigree of nations.
Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.
Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
Might, could, would --they are contemptible auxiliaries.
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.
Numbers constitute the only universal language.
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.