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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"Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning."
"Language creates reality. Words have power. Speak always to create joy."
"To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language."
"As was his language so was his life."
"All words, in every language, are metaphors."
"The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language."
"Old Marley was dead as a doornail... The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile."
"Nature is written in mathematical language."
"I quote others only in order the better to express myself."
"If you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary."
"I can read your body language like a conversation"
"Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport."
"The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness."
"One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity."
"For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody."
"I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them."
"The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages."
"Learn the language that they understand, and when they come upon our doorstep to talk we can talk, and they will get the point. There will be a dialog, there will be some communication, and I am quite certain that then there will be some understanding."
"Being a writer requires an intoxication with language."
"With books we stand on the shoulders of giants."
