quotations about language
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
Elegant language may make darkness appear like light.
AL-IRAKI
attributed, Day's Collacon
I like you; your eyes are full of language.
ANNE SEXTON
letter to Anne Clarke, Jul. 3, 1964
Languages, like our bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of recruits to supply those words that are continually falling out through disuse.
HENRY FELTON
A dissertation on reading the classics and forming a just style
You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest
Language is a mirror of the mind.
J. CORNWELL
attributed, Day's Collacon
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors.
LERA BORODITSKY
"How Language Shapes Thought", Scientific American, Feb. 2011
Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.
ELIZABETH KOSTOVA
The Historian
The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous.
MARIA EDGEWORTH
Angelina
In the acquisition of languages by direct study, where time can be afforded for the purpose, it is found that several languages, belonging to the same family--as the Latin, Italian, and Spanish, for instance--can be acquired together, almost as easily and rapidly, as either of them can be acquired separately, and with far less chance of their being lost from the memory of disuse. By finding the roots in the parent tongue, and by tracing the growth from these roots outward into different tongues, as it were genealogically, it is found that they descend and spread according to certain organic laws of modification and growth.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.
NELSON MANDELA
Long Walk to Freedom
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
JANE WAGNER
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
The power of language lies in combining meaningless sounds into words that in turn are combined into phrases. Research on the communication systems of non-human primates and birds suggests that the ability to combine meaningless vocal elements has evolved repeatedly, but the evolution of syntax (i.e. combining different words to form more complex expressions) was so far considered to be unique to human language.
DAVID WHEATCROFT
"Syntax is not unique to human language", Eureka Alert!, March 8, 2016
Language provides a crucial means of reinforcing cultural and political hegemony. English in America and elsewhere is a linguistic placeholder for colonialism: an invasive species that stood the test of time.
JORDAN MACKENZIE
"English is not the American national language", The Independent Florida Alligator, March 8, 2016
There is every reason in the world to be bilingual. Those who learn a second language become less likely to get Alzheimer's, are better at multitasking, more employable, smarter, more interesting people. The problem is that most students don't actually learn a second language. They take several years of Spanish and learn how to ask where a bathroom is.
DANNY BUGINGO
"Trying to learn a second language is a waste of time", Argonaut, March 31, 2016
He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
The selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. He uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Principles of Success in Literature
No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
"English and Welsh", The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
JACK GILBERT
"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"