If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

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On Language
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If we spoke a different language, we would
perceive a somewhat different world.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Language shapes the way we think, and determines
what we can think about.

• Benjamin Whorf

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One does not inhabit a country one inhabits a
language. That is our country, our fatherland
--and no other.

• E.M. Cioran

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I do not mind what language an opera is sung in
so long as it is an language I do not understand.

• Sir Edward Appleton

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All official institutions of language are
repeating machines school, sports, advertising,
popular songs, news, all continually repeat the
same structure, the same meaning, often the same
words the stereotype is a political fact, the
major figure of ideology.

• Roland Barthes

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Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is
easy to believe that it should be very little
else than such a carrier.

• Louise Bogan

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There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today
I hear every language as if it were the only one,
and when I hear of one that is dying, it
overwhelms me as though it were the death of the
earth.

• Elias Canetti

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Language is a process of free creation its laws
and principles are fixed, but the manner in which
the principles of generation are used is free and
infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and
use of words involves a process of free creation.

• Noam Chomsky

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It is still not enough for language to have
clarity and content... it must also have a goal
and an imperative. Otherwise from language we
descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and
from babble to confusion.

• Rene Daumal

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The living language is like a cowpath it is the
creation of the cows themselves, who, having
created it, follow it or depart from it according
to their whims or their needs. From daily use,
the path undergoes change. A cow is under no
obligation to stay.

• E.B. White

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A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

• Simone Weil

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Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to
complain.

• Lily Tomlin

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Language can only deal meaningfully with a
special, restricted segment of reality. The rest,
and it is presumably the much larger part, is
silence.

• George Steiner

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A linguistic system is a series of differences of
sound combined with a series of differences of
ideas.

• Ferdinand De Sausurre

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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets
and manual workers.

• George Orwell

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There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so
skilful that he obtains identical results in all
children in all parts of the world. The only
language men ever speak perfectly is the one they
learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them
anything!

• Maria Montessori

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An art whose medium is language will always show
a high degree of critical creativeness, for
speech is itself a critique of life it names, it
characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it
creates.

• Thomas Mann

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No literature is complete until the language it
was written in is dead.

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Language is a form of human reason, which has its
internal logic of which man knows nothing.

• Claude Levi Strauss

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The eyes have one language everywhere.

• George Herbert

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Those who know nothing of foreign languages,
knows nothing of their own.

• Wolfgang Johann Goethe

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Language is a city to the building of which every
human being brought a stone.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

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There is the fear, common to all English-only
speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign
languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you
know, why not just come out and say it?

• Barbara Ehrenreich

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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in
language, of language, and for language.

• Gaston Bachelard

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Everything can change, but not the language that
we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive
and final than one's mother's womb.

• Italo Calvino

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To a teacher of languages there comes a time when
the world is but a place of many words and man
appears a mere talking animal not much more
wonderful than a parrot.

• Joseph Conrad

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We dissect nature along lines laid down by our
native language. Language is not simply a
reporting device for experience but a defining
framework for it.

• Benjamin Whorf

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The English language is nobody's special
property. It is the property of the imagination
it is the property of the language itself.

• Derek Walcott

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Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and
pseudo socialism of our time, is a marvelous
being because he sometimes speaks. Language is
the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his
original innocence. Through the Word we may
regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we
possessed in the far-distant past.

• Octavio Paz

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To write or even speak English is not a science
but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever
writes English is involved in a struggle that
never lets up even for a sentence. He is
struggling against vagueness, against obscurity,
against the lure of the decorative adjective,
against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and,
above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead
metaphors with which the language is cluttered
up.

• George Orwell

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Curiously enough, it seems to be only in
describing a mode of language which does not mean
what it says that one can actually say what one
means.

• Paul De Man

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Language is an archeological vehicle... the
language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human
effort and history.

• Russell Hoban

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It is difficult for a woman to define her
feelings in language which is chiefly made by men
to express theirs.

• Thomas Hardy

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Drawing on my fine command of the language, I
said nothing.

• Robert Benchley

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To have another language is to possess a second
soul.

• Charlemagne

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Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it
is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

• Sir Humphrey Davey

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There is no such thing as the Queen's English.
The property has gone into the hands of a joint
stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

• Samuel Clements

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I wish life was not so short, he thought.
Languages take such a time, and so do all the
things one wants to know about.

• J.R. Tolkein

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A man of genius has a right to any mode of
expression.

• Ezra Pound

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Language is the only instrument of science, and
words are but the signs of ideas.

• Samuel Johnson

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I speak two languages. Body and English

• Mae West

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Syllables govern the world.

• John Seldon

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There was speech in their dumbness, language in
their very gesture.

• William Shakespeare

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It is of interest to note that while some
dolphins are reported to have learned English -
up to fifty words used in correct context - no
human being has been reported to have learned
dolphinese.

• Carl Sagan

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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above
the brutes and thanks to words, we have often
sunk to the level of the demons.

• Aldous Huxley

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Language tethers us to the world without it we
spin like atoms.

• Penelope Lively

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For every man there is something in the
vocabulary that would stick to him like a second
skin. His enemies have only to find it.

• Ambrose Bierce

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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

• Elizabeth Bowen

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We are getting into semantics again. If we use
words, there is a very grave danger they will be
misinterpreted.

• H.R. Halderman

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in every language even deafanddumbthy sons
acclaim your glorious name by gorryby jing by
gee by gosh by gum

• e.e. cummings

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And me happiest when I compose poemsLove,
power, the huzza of battleare something, are
muchyet a poem includes them like a poolwater
and reflection.

• Irving Layton

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Language is energy made visible.

• D. Deubelbeiss

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If language hadnt been possible, wed of found
another way. Nature is of necessity and knows no
nos.

• D. Deubelbeiss

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Babble is one way communication. A closed bubble.

• D. Deubelbeiss

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In the beginning was The Word. Nobody knew what
it meant so we decided to talk about it.

• D. Deubelbeiss

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Language is as much what is left out as what is
left in. And in that way it is right.

• D. Deubelbeiss

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