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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"Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured."
"people who understand grammar always have a keen sense of the ridiculous."
"Elementary propositions consist of names."
"All propositions are of equal value."
"My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end."
"I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws."
"To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue."
"No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language."
"When you speak, ask questions. Don't lecture."
"It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind."
"It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description."
"I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view."
"If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language."
"I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language."
"Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you."
"The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant."
"This word "LOVE" - discredited, "clicheed" - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human."
"The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time."
"I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like" - not "thought," not "as if .""
"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
