Language Quotes

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

Lewis Thomas

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Samuel Johnson

Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.

Egyptian Inscription Recorded at the Time of the Invention of Writing

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

Johann von Goethe

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can read.

Mark Twain

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.

William Osle

English is the easiest language to speak badly.

George Bernhard Shaw

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.

Noam Chomsky, Ruth Anshen, Biography of an Idea (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1986), pg. 196

Perhaps of all the creations of man, language is the most astonishing.

Gyles Lytton Sitrachy

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

James Grover Thurbe

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

Christopher Fry

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes, Frogs, 405 B. C.

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.

Sam Rayburn

Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.

Robert E. Lee

Own only what you can carry with you know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Sick I am of idle words, past all reconciling, Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel.

George Du Maurie

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Mark Twain

What is important - what lasts - In another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

Peter Brodie

A man who does not know foreign language is ignorant of his own.

Johann von Goethe

He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

Benjamin Franklin

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Have the wild things no moral or legal rights? What right has man to inflict such long and fearful agony on a fellow creature, simply because that creature does not speak his language?

Ernest Thompson Seton

Music is the last true voice of the human spirit. It can go beyond language, beyond age, and beyond color straight to the mind and heart of all people.

Ben Harpe

For the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Music is the soul of language.

Max Heindel

Do Not Disturb signs should be written in the language of the hotel maids.

Tim Bedore

We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.

Eric Hoffe

As was his language so was his life.

Seneca

Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the ability to express oneself.

Franz Xavier Kroetz

Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body.

Martha Graham

I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the other considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me the quite a nice compliment - - But if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment. A Tramp Abroad, 1880.

Mark Twain

We can lie in the language of dress or try ot tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.

Alison Lurie

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Doug Larson

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.

Mark Twain