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Language Quotes
"Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world."
8
"The English like eccentrics. They just don't like them living next door."
8
"They said I couldn't play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York."
8
"When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on."
8
"When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well."
8
"The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back."
8
"Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing."
8
"There is abundant proof that the opening of our ports always tends to raise the price of foreign corn to the price in the English market, and not to sink the price of British corn to the price in the continental market."
8
"Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language."
7
"There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely."
7
"No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it."
7
"We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?"
7
"A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories."
7
"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen."
7
"We must have a better word than "prefabricated" why not "ready-made"?"
7
"I try for a poetic language that says, This is who we are, where we have been, where we are. This is where we must go. And this is what we must do."
7
"Every word is a prejudice."
6
"French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic."
6
"Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence."
6
"Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification."
6
"If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done."
6
"Some words were made up without any thought given. Nice is one of them. Nice has no meaning. Nice gets thrown out there to replace something meaningful. Take Goodreads and turn it into Nicereads. This goes to show that nice provides no justice."
6
"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
6
"Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them."
6
"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."
6
"Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words."
6
"The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries."
5
"Senator, we just don't use that kind of language on the floor of the Senate."
5
"One who has just learnt a foreign language, constantly resorts, while talking, to words belonging to that language in order to make a show of his or her achievement. But one who knows the language well, seldom uses it when speaking in his or her own mother tongue. Such is the case with those who are well advanced in religion."
5
"One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation."
5
"When I use a word ' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' 'The question is ' said Alice 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is ' said Humpty Dumpty 'which is to be master - that's all.'"
5
"Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it."
5
"They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands, the air was heav'y with th'em&."
5
"No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it."
5
"Percy, we're going to Polyphemus' island! Polyphemus is an S-i-k...a C-y-k..." She stamped her foot in frustration. As smart as she was, Annabeth was dyslexic, too. We could've been there all night while she tried to spell Cyclops. "You know what I mean!"
5
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