Language Quotes

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Vincent Van Gogh

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

Larry Wall

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Language study is a route to maturity. Indeed, in language study as in life, if a person is the same today as he was yesterday, it would be an act of mercy to pronounce him dead and to place him in a coffin, rather than in a classroom.

John A. Rassias

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

James Earl Jones

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

Dorothy Parke

I am is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that I do is the longest sentence?

George Carlin

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

William Carlos Williams

Ours is the age of substitutes instead of language, we have jargon instead of principles, slogans and instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

Eric Bentley

Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.

Keith Bostic

Whoever said Marriage is a 5 - 5 proposition laid the foundation for more divorce fees than any other short sentence in our language.

Austin Elliot

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Whoever has the greatest command of the language, holds the power.

Susan Johnson

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.

Edward R. Murrow, On Winston Churchill, 1954

I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.

Mario M Cuomo

The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.

J. Michael Straczynski