LANGUAGE QUOTES IV

quotations about language

Language quote

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.

ROLAND BARTHES

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Tags: Roland Barthes


Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

KARL MARX

The German Ideology

Tags: Karl Marx


Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other.

PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE

Letters Written by the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son

Tags: Philip Dormer Stanhope


Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

JOHN DRYDEN

Works of John Dryden

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A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

attributed, Day's Collacon

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The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

"On Language", The American Democrat

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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

JEAN GENET

The Blacks

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We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays


Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

EDWARD HIRSCH

How to Read a Poem

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In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?

PABLO NERUDA

The Book of Questions

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In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned.

RICHARD DUPPA

Maxims


Language, which is the uniting bond and very medium of communion between men, is at the same time by the great variety of tongues, the means of severing and estranging nations more than anything else.

HORACE SMITH

The Tin Trumpet: Or, Heads and Tails, for the Wise and Waggish


If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

CONFUCIUS

The Analects

Tags: Confucius


Speech is the best show a man puts on.

BENJAMIN LEE WHORF

Language, Thought and Reality


A language has very little that is arbitrary in it, very little betokening the conscious power and action of man. It owes its origin, not to the thoughts and the will of individuals, but to an instinct actuating a whole people: it expresses what is common to them all: it has sprung out of their universal wants, and lives in their hearts. But after a while in intellectual aristocracy come forward, and frame a new language of their own. The princes and lords of thought shoot forth their winged words into regions beyond the scan of the people. They require a gold coinage, in addition to the common currency.

JULIUS CHARLES HARE

Guesses at Truth

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Men are apt to overvalue the tongues, and to think they have made considerable progress in learning when they have once overcome these; yet in reality there is no internal worth in them, and men may understand a thousand languages without being the wiser.

E. D. BAKER

attributed, Day's Collacon


Language is a living original; it is not made but grows. The growth of language repeats the growth of the plant; at first it is only root, next it puts forth a stem, then leaves, and finally blossoms.

WILLIAM SWINTON

Rambles Among Words: Their Poetry, History and Wisdom


If the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now -- well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.

MAX VENTILLA

"Learn Different: Silicon Valley disrupts education", The New Yorker, March 7, 2016


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

DOUG LARSON

attributed, If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People?

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The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

Essays

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