Language quotes
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside language — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity."
"Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas."
"It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent."
"The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things."
"False language, evil in itself, infects the soul with evil."
"Hear this if you can: If you want to reach him You have to go beyond yourself And when you finally arrive at the land of absence Be silent Don’t say a thing Ecstasy, not words, is the language spoken there"
"One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages."
"A man who can speak two languages is worth two men."
"Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human."
"A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed."
"There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be."
"... one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross over-simplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement."
"English is the easiest language to speak badly."
"We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought."
"Music is the language spoken by angels."
"A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language."
"Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers."
"I could eat healthier, I could drink less. I should be learning another language and working out more, but I'm just always saying, 'Ah, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.'"
"Visual journaling allows us to access our inner language of imagery and express it both verbally and visually, while exploring the connection between image and word."
"[My mother tongue is] Albanian. But, I am equally fluent in Bengali (language of Calcutta) and English."
