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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"The language of the Veda itself is sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that same vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit fot the impersonal knowledge."
"Heart is a sea, language is the shore. Whatever is in a sea hits the shore."
"Ideas do not exist separately from language."
"Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page."
"I think that phrase is the most horrible phrase in the English language - 'I don't know.' It's terribly embarrassing."
"The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms."
"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'"
"Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."
"A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them."
"Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it."
"The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists."
"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all."
"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."
"Music is a language, a universal language."
"Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it."
"There is no language without deceit."
"I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting [verbal] imagery which I guess is a poetic touch."
"Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a 'ruling thought'. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, ... for language itself is a network of 'fixed ideas'. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually."
"You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language."
"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."
