quotations about language
The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous.
MARIA EDGEWORTH
Angelina
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
Language is a window to the world.
SUSANNA ZARAYSKY
Language Is Music: Over 100 Fun & Easy Tips to Learn Foreign Languages
Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb! for I suppose he was dumb at the Creation, and must go round an entire circle in order to return to that blessed state.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, Apr. 1841
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
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
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
STANLEY FISH
How to Write a Sentence
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
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
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
Language is a mirror of the mind.
J. CORNWELL
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
JACK GILBERT
"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"
Without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?
MELINA MARCHETTA
Finnikin of the Rock
Language is such a pervasive feature of being a human being that when you can't talk anymore, people find it very frightening, even if your other cognitive features are pretty much intact. People see it as, you must have a lot of other things wrong with you.
AUDREY HOLLAND
"Aphasia is a little-known, yet growing, health problem", Philly, March 26, 2016
I don't speak ... I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
There is a tradition of writers trying to escape their language and render their art in a foreign tongue. Some do it because they are intoxicated by the possibilities offered in a new language--the words and turns of phrase for which their own language doesn't have any equivalents, the strange new rhythms and patterns of sound.
E. W.
"Why do writers abandon their native language?", The Economist, March 14, 2016
The enterprise of describing something in language that has never been described before is a very difficult thing to do. When you decide to do away with old cliches or old phraseologies, and to come up with a new way of saying something, it's extremely difficult.
GAO XINGJIAN
"A Conversation with Gao Xingjian", Asia Society