Quotes on Language

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Culture is worth a little risk.

A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.

The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.

Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue.

My language! heavens!I am the best of them that speak this speech. Were I but where 'tis spoken.

We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words.

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.

A thing well said will be wit in all languages.

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them.

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.