Quotes about language
page 2

“Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Journal entry (14 May 1915), p. 48
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

Parting

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

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Housing

“The name of a person you love is more than language.”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

Love, Personality

“It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Color of Magic

Drink

“I'm no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language, there isn't even a word for freedom.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Freedom

“Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body.”

Martha Graham (1894–1991) American dancer and choreographer

New York Times interview (1985)
Context: To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show.

Soul, Dance

“Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

People

“Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.”

Jean Webster (1876–1916) American novelist

World, Understanding, Time, Past

“Language is wine upon the lips.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Wine

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 1
Context: It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

“Just remember, when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do.”

Sidney Sheldon Windmills of the Gods

Source: Windmills of the Gods

“The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.”

Alice Munro book The Moons of Jupiter

Source: The Moons of Jupiter

Despair

“The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Context: This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)

World, Understanding

“It must be powerful language if you canna make oout what the heel it’s goin’ on aboot!”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

“Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”

Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking-Glass

Source: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

“To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.”

Robert Harris (1957) novelist

“Magic is the art of thinking, not strength or language.”

Christopher Paolini book Eldest

Source: Eldest

Art, Thinking

“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Variant: Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

People, Communication, Thinking

“when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

World, Way, Understanding

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.
§ 109
Source: Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Intelligence

“A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies
that have moulded them”

Jawaharlal Nehru book The Discovery of India

Source: The Discovery of India

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Death, God, Game

“Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: Interesting Times: The Play

“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”

Rita Mae Brown (1944) Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist

“Ah," said Mr Pin. "Right. I remember. You are concerned citizens." He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone'.”

Terry Pratchett book The Truth

Source: The Truth

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, which stands continually open before our eyes (I say the 'Universe'), but can not be understood without first learning to comprehend the language and know the characters as it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to humanly understand a word; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.”

Galileo Galilei book The Assayer

From Italian: La filosofia è scritta in questo grandissimo libro, che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi agli occhi (io dico l'Universo), ma non si può intendere, se prima non il sapere a intender la lingua, e conoscer i caratteri ne quali è scritto. Egli è scritto in lingua matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli, cerchi ed altre figure geometriche, senza i quali mezzi è impossibile intenderne umanamente parola; senza questi è un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro labirinto.
Other translations:
Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
The Assayer (1623), as translated by Thomas Salusbury (1661), p. 178, as quoted in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (2003) by Edwin Arthur Burtt, p. 75.
Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.
As translated in The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966) by Richard Henry Popkin, p. 65
Il Saggiatore (1623)
Source: Galilei, Galileo. Il Saggiatore: Nel Quale Con Bilancia Efquifita E Giufta Si Ponderano Le Cofe Contenute Nellalibra Astronomica E Filosofica Di Lotario Sarsi Sigensano, Scritto in Forma Di Lettera All'Illustr. Et Rever. Mons. D. Virginio Cesarini. In Roma: G. Mascardi, 1623. Google Play. Google. Web. 22 Dec. 2015. <https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-U0ZAAAAYAAJ>.

Books, Mathematics, Understanding, Learning

“for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part I, Ch. 9
Source: To the Lighthouse (1927)
Context: Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.

Men, Knowledge

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

Courage

“Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Women

“The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them—violence.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

“He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Home, Housing

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

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Drawing, Funny

“Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought.... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

The Passion According to G.H. (1964), p. 169

Love, Life, Reality, Silence

“For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“The people from Prague and other Czechs should be whipped who speak half Czech and half German (…) And who could enumerate how the Czech language has already been corrupted, so that the true Czech hears they speak, but he does not understand them. And from that arises envy, anger, conflict, strife and Czech humiliation.”

Jan Hus (1369–1415) Czech linguist, religion writer, theologist, university educator and science writer

Source: A Companion to Jan Hus (2015), pp. 190-191.

People, Understanding, Envy, Anger

“I am great admirer of China. It has shown great discipline and dedication in attacking n export markets. China is working furiously on its English-language capability and its quality control. As China become stronger, it sends a clear signal that we in India have to harder to stay ahead.”

N. R. Narayana Murthy (1946) Indian businessman

Source: Entrepreneur of the New Millenium: N.R. Narayana Murthy : Life & Times of N.R. Narayana Murthy, p. 26

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), pp. 158-159

Life, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“When we speak of the Rumanian nation, we refer not only to the Rumanians currently living on the same territory, with the same past and same future, the same habits, the same language, the same interests. When we speak of the Rumanian nation we refer to all Rumanians, dead or alive, who have lived on this land of ours from the beginnings of history and will live on it also in the future.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

History, Past, Future, Dead

“Comics are an international language, they can cross boundaries and generations. Comics are a bridge between all cultures”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

As quoted in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1441185755 p. 5

“You know what they say - the sweetest word in the English language is revenge.”

Peter Beard (1938–2020) American photographer and writer

Interview magazine, 1978.

Revenge

“I'm convinced that you could design a language about a tenth of the size of C++ (whichever way you measure size) providing roughly what C++ does.”

Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) Danish computer scientist, creator of C++

[Federico Biancuzzi, Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages, https://books.google.com/books?id=yB1WwURwBUQC&pg=PA14, 21 March 2009, "O'Reilly Media, Inc.", 978-0-596-55550-4, 14]

Way

“p>Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

Eduardo Galeano book The Book of Embraces

The Nobodies; Cied in Mother Jones Magazine (1991) The Book of Embraces. March-April 1991. p. 71
The Book of Embraces (1991)

Life, Children, World, Religion

“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

Life, War, World, Peace

“When you look at a tree, you are aware of the tree. When you have a thought or feeling, you are aware of that thought or feeling. When you have a pleasurable or painful experience, you are aware of that experience. These seem to be true and obvious statements. Yet if you look at them very closely, you will find that in a subtle way their very structure contains a fundamental illusion, an illusion which is unavoidable when you use language. Thought and language create an apparent duality and a separate person where there is none.
The truth is you are not somebody who is aware of the tree, the thought, feeling or experience. You are the awareness or consciousness in and by which those things appear. As you go about your life, can you be aware of yourself as the awareness in which the entire content of your life unfolds?”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Stillness Speaks (2003)

Life, Pain, Pleasure, Truth

“Is it not possible that the chimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe? A feeling generated by the mystery of water; water that seems alive, always rushing past yet never going, always the same yet ever different. Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of the elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control? Only when our prehistoric ancestors developed language would it have been possible to discuss such internal feelings and create a shared religion.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Source: Reason for Hope: a Spiritual Journey (2000), p. 189

Religion, Feeling, Nature, Water

“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Variant translation: We inhabit a language rather than a country.
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Country

“He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and a smelly fish.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

This has long been attributed to Rizal as part of a poem, titled Sa Aking Mga Kabata (To My Fellow Children), he wrote at the age of 8, as quoted in " Community Celebrates Rizal Day" in Asian Journal USA (31 December 2007) http://asianjournalusa.com/community-celebrates-rizal-day-p3868-95.htm, but this has become disputed as highly unlikely in "Did young Rizal really write poem for children?" by Ambeth R. Ocampo, in Philippine Daily Inquirer (22 August 22 2011) http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/45479/did-young-rizal-really-write-poem-for-children Disputed

Love, Fish, Animals

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

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

World

“The merest schoolgirl [school girl, ] when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer [try to] describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Love, Pain, School, Girl

“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 112
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Reality

“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.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

English and Welsh (1955)

Love, Study

“370. But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know…"”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.
On Certainty (1969)

Game, Question

“The foreign-born population of this country must be an Americanized population. No other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace. It must talk the language of its native-born fellow-citizens; it must possess American citizenship and American ideals. It must stand firm by its oath of allegiance in word and deed and must show that in very fact it has renounced allegiance to every prince, potentate, or foreign government. It must be maintained on an American standard of living so as to prevent labor disturbances in important plants and at critical times. None of these objects can be secured as long as we have immigrant colonies, ghettos, and immigrant sections, and above all they cannot be assured so long as we consider the immigrant only as an industrial asset. The immigrant must not be allowed to drift or to be put at the mercy of the exploiter. Our object is not to imitate one of the older racial types, but to maintain a new American type and then to secure loyalty to this type. We cannot secure such loyalty unless we make this a country where men shall feel that they have justice and also where they shall feel that they are required to perform the duties imposed upon them.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: The foreign-born population of this country must be an Americanized population. No other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace. It must talk the language of its native-born fellow-citizens; it must possess American citizenship and American ideals. It must stand firm by its oath of allegiance in word and deed and must show that in very fact it has renounced allegiance to every prince, potentate, or foreign government. It must be maintained on an American standard of living so as to prevent labor disturbances in important plants and at critical times. None of these objects can be secured as long as we have immigrant colonies, ghettos, and immigrant sections, and above all they cannot be assured so long as we consider the immigrant only as an industrial asset. The immigrant must not be allowed to drift or to be put at the mercy of the exploiter. Our object is not to imitate one of the older racial types, but to maintain a new American type and then to secure loyalty to this type. We cannot secure such loyalty unless we make this a country where men shall feel that they have justice and also where they shall feel that they are required to perform the duties imposed upon them. The policy of 'Let alone' which we have hitherto pursued is thoroughly vicious from two standpoints. By this policy we have permitted the immigrants, and too often the native-born laborers as well, to suffer injustice. Moreover, by this policy we have failed to impress upon the immigrant and upon the native-born as well that they are expected to do justice as well as to receive justice, that they are expected to be heartily and actively and single-mindedly loyal to the flag no less than to benefit by living under it.

Men, War, Peace, Justice

“The impetuous conquests of Alexander, the more politic and premeditated extension of territory made by the Romans, the wild and cruel incursions of the Mexicans, and the despotic acquisitions of the incas, have in both hemispheres contributed to put an end to the separate existence of many tribes as independent nations, and tended at the same time to establish more extended international amalgamation. Men of great and strong minds, as well as whole nations, acted under the influence of one idea, the purity of which was, however, utterly unknown to them. It was Christianity which first promulgated the truth of its exalted charity, although the seed sown yielded but a slow and scanty harvest. Before the religion of Christ manifested its form, its existence was only revealed by a faint foreshadowing presentiment. In recent times, the idea of civilization has acquired additional intensity, and has given rise to a desire of extending more widely the relations of national intercourse and of intellectual cultivation; even selfishness begins to learn that by such a course its interests will be better served than by violent and forced isolation. Language more than any other attribute of mankind, binds together the whole human race. By its idiomatic properties it certainly seems to separate nations, but the reciprocal understanding of foreign languages connects men together on the other hand without injuring individual national characteristics.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

Kosmos (1847)

Men, Truth, Religion, Idea

“Being true is different from being taken as true, whether by one or by many or everybody, and in no case is it to be reduced to it. There is no contradiction in something's being true which everybody takes to be false. I understand by 'laws of logic' not psychological laws of takings-to-be-true, but laws of truth. …If being true is thus independent of being acknowledged by somebody or other, then the laws of truth are not psychological laws: they are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. It is because of this that they have authority for our thought if it would attain truth. They do not bear the relation to thought that the laws of grammar bear to language; they do not make explicit the nature of our human thinking and change as it changes.”

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher

Introduction, Tr. Montgomery Furth (1964)
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893 and 1903

Truth, Law, Understanding, Nature

“We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race. We all share the same basic values.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

As quoted in Simply Living: The Spirit of the Indigenous People (1999) edited by Shirley A. Jones

Religion, Color

“In this way, a philosophy which veiled the Philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonization of the commonplace. It expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the Culture-Philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. From this time forward he began to allow every one, and even himself, to reflect, to investigate, to aestheticise, and, more particularly, to make poetry, music, and even pictures—not to mention systems of philosophy; provided, of course, that … no assault were made upon the “reasonable” and the “real”—that is to say, upon the Philistine.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

(A. Ludovici trans.), “David Strauss,” § 1.2, p. 17
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Love, World, Music, Way

“The general reference of the philosophical discussion is usually the triangle world: world-language-subject, the relation of the subject to the world of objects, mediated through language.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

77
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

World

“Mr. President, I am not undertaking to answer the charge that I am ignorant. It is true. I am an ignorant man. I have had no college education. I have not even had a high school education. But the things that takes me far in politics is that I do not have to color what comes into my mind and into my heart. I say it unvarnished. I say it without veneer. I have not the learning to do otherwise, and therefore my ignorance is often not detected.

I know the hearts of the People because I have not colored my own. I know when I am right in my own conscience. I do not talk one way in the cloakroom and another way out here. I do not talk one way back there in the hills of Louisiana and another way here in the Senate.

I have one language. Ignorant as it is, it is the universal language within the sphere in which I operate. Its simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters and education.

Nonetheless my voice will be the same as it has been. Patronage will not change it. Fear will not change it. Persecution will not change it. It cannot be changed while people suffer. The only way it can be changed is to make the lives of these people decent and respectable. No one will ever hear political opposition out of me when that is done.”

Huey Long (1893–1935) American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator

Huey Long, U.S. Senate floor speech, March 5, 1935

People, Education, Fear, School

“Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Worpswede (1903)

People

“We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Montaigne" http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Woolf_Montaigne.html The Common Reader (1925)

Life, Painting

“I recognized my own creative voice filtered through those six strings, but it was also something else entirely. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me.”

Slash (musician) book Slash

Source: Slash (2007) by Anthony Bozza & Mason Segal,, p. 29

Feeling

“But since, if the usefulness of the legislation, and the sequence and beauty of the history, were universally evident of itself, we should not believe that any other thing could be understood in the Scriptures save what was obvious, the word of God has arranged that certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and offences, and impossibilities, should be introduced into the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not, through being drawn away in all directions by the merely attractive nature of the language, either altogether fall away from the (true) doctrines, as learning nothing worthy of God, or, by not departing from the letter, come to the knowledge of nothing more divine.”

Origen (185–254) Christian scholar in Alexandria

On First Principles, Bk. 4, ch. 2, par. 15
On First Principles

God, Law, Beauty, History

“The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i. e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Preface
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Books, Thinking

“The language of imagination is the native language of man. It is the language of his excited intellect, of his aroused passions, of his devotion, of all the higher moods and temperaments of his mind.”

George Gilfillan (1813–1878) Scottish writer

Introduction
Bards of the Bible, 1850

Imagination, Mood, Passion

“Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis). Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendour and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. This has nothing to do with fostering an aesthetic relativism which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty, but rather a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it. If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful, the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love. So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new “language of parables”. We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Section 167
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Love, Life, Truth, Faith

“Two conflicting types of educational systems spring from these conflicting aims. One is public and common to many, the other private and domestic. If you wish to know what is meant by public education, read Plato's Republic. Those who merely judge books by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education ever written. In popular estimation the Platonic Institute stands for all that is fanciful and unreal. For my own part I should have thought the system of Lycurgus far more impracticable had he merely committed it to writing. Plato only sought to purge man's heart; Lycurgus turned it from its natural course. The public institute does not and cannot exist, for there is neither country nor patriot. The very words should be struck out of our language. The reason does not concern us at present, so that though I know it I refrain from stating it.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book I

Books, Education, Spring, Nature

“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.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

"Alboin Errol", in The Lost Road (1987). Compare this with "The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne" by Geoffrey Chaucer

Life, Time

“Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature…. A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Understanding, Question, Nature, Universe

“I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Quoted in Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1944)
1940s

“I present you with a Key : I have not heard of the like yet framed, since it pleased God to bring that mighty continent of America to light. Others of my countrymen have often, and excellently, and lately, written of the country, and none that I know beyond the goodness and worth of it.
This Key respects the native language of it, and happily may unlock some rarities concerning the natives themselves, not yet discovered.”

Roger Williams (theologian) (1603–1684) English Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Providence Plantation

Preface
A Key into the Language of America (1643)

God, Light, Country

“I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

Dreams

“Those who advocate common usage in philosophy sometimes speak in a manner that suggests the mystique of the 'common man.' They may admit that in organic chemistry there is need of long words, and that quantum physics requires formulas that are difficult to translate into ordinary English, but philosophy (they think) is different. It is not the function of philosophy – so they maintain – to teach something that uneducated people do not know; on the contrary, its function is to teach superior persons that they are not as superior as they thought they were, and that those who are really superior can show their skill by making sense of common sense. No one wants to alter the language of common sense, any more than we wish to give up talking of the sun rising and setting. But astronomers find a different language better, and I contend that a different language is better in philosophy. Let us take an example, that of perception. There is here an admixture of philosophical and scientific questions, but this admixture is inevitable in many questions, or, if not inevitable, can only be avoided by confining ourselves to comparatively unimportant aspects of the matter in hand. Here is a series of questions and answers.
Q. When I see a table, will what I see be still there if I shut my eyes?
A. That depends upon the sense in which you use the word 'see.'
Q. What is still there when I shut my eyes?
A. This is an empirical question. Don't bother me with it, but ask the physicists.
Q. What exists when my eyes are open, but not when they are shut?
A. This again is empirical, but in deference to previous philosophers I will answer you: colored surfaces.
Q. May I infer that there are two senses of 'see'? In the first, when I 'see' a table, I 'see' something conjectural about which physics has vague notions that are probably wrong. In the second, I 'see' colored surfaces which cease to exist when I shut my eyes.
A. That is correct if you want to think clearly, but our philosophy makes clear thinking unnecessary. By oscillating between the two meanings, we avoid paradox and shock, which is more than most philosophers do.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 159

People, Color, Question, Thinking

“Mathematics is a language.”

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) physicist

At a Yale faculty meeting, during a discussion of language requirements in the undergraduate curriculum. Quoted in Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1942), p. 280.
Attributed

Mathematics

“As historical and social beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured lifeworld. In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power. Language is not a kind of private property. No one possesses exclusive rights over the common medium of the communicative practices we must intersubjectively share. No single participant can control the structure, or even the course, of processes of reaching understanding and self-understanding. How speakers and hearers make use of their communicative freedom to take yes- or no-positions is not a matter of their subjective discretion. For they are free only in virtue of the binding force of the justifiable claims they raise towards one another. The logos of language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the subjectivity of speakers.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Habermas (2003) The Future of Human Nature. p. 10

World, Communication, Understanding, Freedom

“The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

The New York Times (26 November 1978)

People, Books, Faith, Country

“We must plow through the whole of language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

“The idea of an Afrikaner people as a cultural entity and religious group with a special language will be retained in South Africa as long as civilisation stands.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As cited in Dictionary of South African Quotations, Jennifer Crwys-Williams, Penguin Books 1994, p. 11

People, Idea

“For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Love, Change

“Psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, 'describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands.”

Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) British-American psychologist

Source: The Scientific Analysis of Personality, 1965, p. 18

Understanding

“First of all we must insist that the immigrant that comes here is willing to become a Canadian and is willing to assimilate our ways, he should be treated on equal grounds and it would be shameful to discriminate against such a person for reasons of their beliefs or the place of birth or origin. But it is the responsibility of that person to become a Canadian in all aspects of life, nothing else but a Canadian. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says that he is a Canadian, but tries to impose his customs and habits upon us, is not a Canadian. We have room for only one flag, the Canadian flag. There is room for only two languages here, English and French. And we have room for loyalty, but only one, loyalty to the Canadian people. We won’t accept anyone, I’m saying anyone, who will try to impose his religion or his customs on us.”

Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919) 7th prime minister of Canada

allegedly said in 1907 according to 13 March 2013 article http://princearthurherald.com/en/politics-2/another-gaffe-by-trudeau-551 by Michael Eugenio of the Herald. The quote was also used 8 December 2015 by David Kendrick in Guelph Mercury https://www.guelphmercury.com/opinion-story/6163164-canada-is-losing-some-of-its-identity/ 3 March 2017 report by Melissa Martin of Winnipeg Free Press https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/special/goodnews/moment-of-clarity-in-my-canada-415358084.html described as having been wrongly attributed for at least 7 years, based on a Teddy Roosevelt quote Misattributed

Life, People, Religion, Way

“The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

"If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html in "The New York Times (29 July 1979)

Children, People, Truth, Education

“BASIC is to computation what QWERTY is to typing. Many teachers have learned BASIC, many books have been written about it, many computers have been built in such a way that BASIC is "hardwired" into them. In the case of the typewriter, we noted how people invent "rationalizations" to justify the status quo. In the case of BASIC, the phenomenon has gone much further, to the point where it resembles ideology formation. Complex arguments are invented to justify features of BASIC that were originally included because the primitive technology demanded them or because alternatives were not well enough known at the time the language was designed.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 1, Computers and Computer Cultures

People, Books, Way, Learning

“With the publication of J. M. Keynes’s General Theory in 1936 and the mathematical formalizations of his theory by J. R. Hicks (1937) and others, the language of macro-economic theory became systems of simultaneous equations. These are general equilibrium systems of interdependence in the sense that the relationships describe an entire national economy, not just a particular industry or sector. The systems are usually not completely closed; they depend on exogenous parameters including instruments controlled by policy-makers. Seeking definite relationships of economic outcomes to policies and other exogenous variables, qualitative and quantitative, these models sacrifice detail and generality, limiting the number of variables and equations by aggregations over agents, commodities, assets, and time.”

James Tobin (1918–2002) American economist

Source: "Money and Finance in the Macro-Economic Process" (1982), p. 12

Mathematics, Sense, Time, Dependency

“We do not have a complete and satisfying knowledge of the world. We are reduced to the simple conclusion that everywhere in the world there is life like ourselves and that all life is shrouded in mystery. A true acquaintance with the world consists in being filled with a sense of the mystery of existence and life. This mystery becomes only more mysterious with every advance in scientific research. To be filled with the mystery of life is like that which is called in the language of mysticism the "wise ignorance," an ignorance which is nonetheless knowledge of the essential.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 304

Life, World, Knowledge, Sense

“Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us — in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world — this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men, World, Law, Confidence

“As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Relatively Einstein http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/relativelyeinstein.shtml episode 3, "Fantasy Physics" (18 January 2005); the Discworld version of this statement appears in Night Watch (2002) General sources

“The Large Testament is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's Don Juan and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter writer – except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from no other language known to me – he bears a particular resemblance.”

Francois Villon (1431–1463) Mediæval French poet

Robert Louis Stevenson Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882), ch. 6.
Criticism

Life, World, Soul, Idea

“One’s language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English. … Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

Part I, p. 27
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

Soul, Communication, Housing

“Irish is a leprechaun language.”

Sammy Wilson (1953) British politician

The Irish News (November 3, 1987)

“My programming language was solder.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

On his early computers, from a talk "When I Were A Lad, We Used To Dream of 64K" at the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland, (August 2005)
General sources

“One culture, one civilization, one language, and one ethnic group.”

Tarō Asō (1940) 92nd Prime Minister of Japan

About Japan, as quoted in "Ghosts of Wartime Japan Haunt Koizumi's Cabinet" http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=f6f50bd7a1687ece711a7ef721bb6fb8 (3 November 2005), by Christopher Reed, New America Media.

“I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language […] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.”

Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) Danish programmer and creator of PHP

Itconversations.com http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail58.html quoted in www.dasgenie.com http://www.dasgenie.com/scrap/archives/000060.html

Way, Idea

“Graphic representation constitutes one of the basic sign-systems conceived by the human mind for the purposes of storing, understanding, and communicating essential information. As a "language" for the eye, graphics benefits from the ubiquitous properties of visual perception. As a monosemic system, it forms the rational part of the world of images.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 2

World, Communication, Understanding, Parting

“We went to the Opera to hear music of the vanguard, Maximilian by Darius Milhaud. We clutched our chair. But we were hurled out of it by such a hurricane of wrong notes that we found ourselves, half dead, on the stairway, without knowing how we could fall down quite so far. The composer knows the grammar, the spelling and the language; but he can speak only Esperanto and Volapuk. It is a work of a Communist traveling salesman.”

Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) French composer and teacher

Anonymous reviewer, as quoted in Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time (1965) by Nicolas Slonimsky, p. 126
About

Music, Travel, Dead

“So today, let me say: Sisters and brothers of India — my confidence in what our nations can achieve together is rooted in the values we share. For we may have our different histories and speak different languages, but when we look at each other, we see a reflection of ourselves.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Address to the People of India (January 2015)

Confidence, History, Sister

“Finality, Sir, is not the language of politics.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1859/feb/28/leave in the House of Commons (28 February 1859). 1850s

“I was named Olaudah, which, in our language, signifies vicissitude or fortune also, one favoured, and having a loud voice and well spoken.”

Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) African abolitionist

Chap. I
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

“You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions…. I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,…". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 15e

People, Understanding, Question, Problem

“Language is texture of images and music. We speak in images and rhythm, by taking help of words.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

Foreword, 'Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika', Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DQPD8F4/ From Prose

Music, Help

Quotes about language page 2

Quotes about language
page 2