Quotes on Language

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language... It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.'

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel

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.

I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of dead languages or to the study of history which, for the most part, is a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill the individual with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

Evangelicalism is like my religious mother tongue. I revert to it whenever I’m angry or excited or surrounded by other people who understand what I’m saying. And it’s the language in which I most often hear God’s voice on the rare occasion that it rises above the noise.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

The photograph is an undeniably powerful medium. Free from the constraints of language, and harnessing the unique qualities of a single moment frozen in time.

The louder our world today is, the deeper God seems to remain in silence. Silence is the language of eternity; noise passes.