quotations about language
Language is not a wonderful natural asset; it is an artificial device that constantly misleads us and does us great harm; and the modern way of studying language is itself harmful because it enhances the reputation of language and sustains corrupt ways of thought.
AMOREY GETHIN
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introduction, Language and Thought: A Rational Enquiry Into Their Nature and Relationship
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If the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now -- well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.
MAX VENTILLA
"Learn Different: Silicon Valley disrupts education", The New Yorker, March 7, 2016
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The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Essays
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For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
STEPHEN HAWKING
British Telecom advertisement, 1993
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Language is a living original; it is not made but grows. The growth of language repeats the growth of the plant; at first it is only root, next it puts forth a stem, then leaves, and finally blossoms.
WILLIAM SWINTON
Rambles Among Words: Their Poetry, History and Wisdom
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Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
MURIEL BARBERY
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
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Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.
GENE WOLFE
"The Death of Doctor Island", Universe 3
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Language, which is the uniting bond and very medium of communion between men, is at the same time by the great variety of tongues, the means of severing and estranging nations more than anything else.
HORACE SMITH
The Tin Trumpet: Or, Heads and Tails, for the Wise and Waggish
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Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art.
E. L. JAMES
Fifty Shades of Grey
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None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
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Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.
JOHN DRYDEN
Works of John Dryden
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It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words
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Languages are the key or entry to the sciences and nothing more; contempt for the one redounds on the other. The question is not whether the languages be ancient of modern, dead or living; but whether they be rude or polished, whether the books found in them show a good or a bad taste.
BRUYERE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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In the last century researchers and pedagogues viewed children learning a second language as an impediment to learning. The resultant pedagogical philosophy delayed the introduction of "foreign" languages to the high school years, just in time for the real impediment to focused learning -- adolescence.
JAY KUTEN
"Language is food for the brain", Wanganui Chronicle, March 16, 2016
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The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
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There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
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Language was invented for one reason, boys -- to woo women.
N. H. KLEINBAUM
Dead Poets Society
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Men are apt to overvalue the tongues, and to think they have made considerable progress in learning when they have once overcome these; yet in reality there is no internal worth in them, and men may understand a thousand languages without being the wiser.
E. D. BAKER
attributed, Day's Collacon
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A man reacheth not to excellence with one language.
R. ASCHAM
attributed, Day's Collacon
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In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
MARK TWAIN
Innocents Abroad
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