Quotes on Language

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health.

The lapse of ages changes all things - time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing about, around, and underneath man, except man himself.

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle

It is the theory which decides what we can observe

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

The four most expensive words in the English language are, 'This time it's different.'

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates. Indeed, the beauty and elegance of the physical laws themselves are only apparent when expressed in the appropriate mathematical framework.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful 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 teaches them anything.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you.

I have a tendency to want to understand everything people say and everything I hear, both at work and outside, even at a distance, even if it’s one of the innumerable languages I don’t know, even if it’s in an indistinguishable murmur or imperceptible whisper, even if it would be better that I didn’t understand and what’s said is not intended for my ears or is said precisely so I won’t understand it.

ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS.

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Fortunate are those who take the first step. Someday people will realize that men and women are capable of speaking the language of the angels - that all of us are possessed of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and that we can perform miracles, cure, prophesy, and understand.