"Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?"
Read quote
3 likes
Language quotes
Language
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Language
Browse quotes that often appear alongside language — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Language quotes (page 33 of 120)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it."
Read quote
3 likes
"The English language is not always the President's friend."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick."
Read quote
3 likes
"The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation."
Read quote
3 likes
"The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself."
Read quote
3 likes
"Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs."
Read quote
3 likes
"From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense."
Read quote
3 likes
"Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that circulates informally."
Read quote
3 likes
"Welsh is now almost a national language in Wales. The Scottish dialects are reviving to some extent. I don't think it's a major thing, but it's there, and it's happening elsewhere."
Read quote
3 likes
"Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language."
Read quote
3 likes
"It's true that language is in a sense linear but that is as obvious as perceptual space is three-dimensional."
Read quote
3 likes
"The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought."
Read quote
3 likes
"If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one."
Read quote
3 likes
"How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint."
Read quote
3 likes
"The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly."
Read quote
3 likes
"It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard."
Read quote
3 likes
"The language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand."
Read quote
3 likes
"Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!"
Read quote
3 likes