Quotes about language
page 5

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Ch. 51

“Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 111-112
Source: Course in General Linguistics
Context: Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. here are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.

“You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.”

Lily King (1963) American writer

Source: Euphoria

Way, Communication, Sense

“Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

Love, God

“He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?”

Philippa Gregory book The Constant Princess

Source: The Constant Princess

“They're on their way to the foreign-language wing. That's no surprise. The foreign kids are always here, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they'll choke to death on too much American.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Death, Way, Time

“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”

Adam Gopnik book Paris to the Moon

Source: Paris to the Moon

“Deep down, you see, I long to be arcane, esoteric. I would love to confound people with their own language.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

Love, People

“The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)
Context: The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

Madness

“Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.”

Pramoedya Ananta Toer book Bumi Manusia

Source: Bumi Manusia

Color, Literature, Painting

“I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.”

Anaïs Nin book Delta of Venus

As quoted in D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996) by Leo Hamalian, p. 90
Source: Delta of Venus

Sex, Feeling, Sense, Box

“I'm swimming in your cadences that you permeate my very language.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: The Eternal Now

Pain, Sense, Solitude, Loneliness

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”

Roland Barthes book The Pleasure of the Text

Source: The Pleasure of the Text

Science

“For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Sermons in Cats the musical"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

Intelligence, Communication

“He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched her facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore read Tiger Lily better than anyone else.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Girl, Reading

“Love will heal
What language fails to know”

Eavan Boland (1944) Irish poet

Love

“Language is the only homeland.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. […] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 6 : 'Hunger', p. 187

Women, Health, Alcohol, Beauty

“Considering Adrian had once gotten bored while reading while reading a particularly long menu, I had a hard time imagining he'd read the Hugo book in any language.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

Books, Imagination, Time, Reading

“I have no words. Sixteen languages, but no words.
-Vishous”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Unleashed

“Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: Freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You're not free to move unless you've learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practise. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use the language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.

Knowledge, Learning

“All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.”

Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006) American writer

Business, Thinking, Reality, Sincerity

“I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.”

Aleister Crowley book Diary of a Drug Fiend

Source: Diary of a Drug Fiend

“It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.”

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) American writer

Source: I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven

World

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Love, People, Reading

“Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.

Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.

Their language has been lost.

But not the gestures.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Secret, Tree, Singing

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

Beauty, Art, Nature, Success

“The aim of language… is to communicate… to impart to others the results one has obtained… As I talk, I reveal the situation… I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Communication, Change

“Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.”

Alice Sebold book Lucky

Source: Lucky

Family, Problem, Learning, Country

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Library of Babel

Source: The Library of Babel

Understanding, Reading

“If and perhaps…. The language of procrastination and uncertainty. That's just people looking to justify their own lack of action.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Emperor of Nihon-Ja

People

“It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

“That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

“LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Music

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Source: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

World, Silence

“… when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars”

Isabel Allende book Eva Luna

Source: Eva Luna

Star, Communication

“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

World, Understanding, Time, Waiting

“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language, with this 'relation,' precisely, which is yours.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

Derrida Jacques, Elisabeth Weber (1995), Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994. p. 115

Understanding

“The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Expanded Universe

Source: "The Happy Days Ahead" in Expanded Universe (1980)
Context: I started clipping and filing by categories on trends as early as 1930 and my "youngest" file was started in 1945.
Span of time is important; the 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

History, Mathematics, Understanding, Learning

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

John Irving In One Person

Source: In One Person

Love, Books, Way, Tear

“O, with what freshness, what solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate man, "Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!" There is no speech nor language where this voice is not heard; but the bold, bad man heard it not. He woke with an oath and a curse. What to him was the gold and purple, the daily miracle of morning!”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Ch 36 Emmeline and Cassy
Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

Beauty, Chance

“Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”

Laura Hillenbrand book Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Source: Seabiscuit: An American Legend

People, Way, Understanding, Change

“Sebastian sighed an exaggerated sigh and swung the door shut. Clary stared at Jace. "What the f-"
"Language, Fray." Jace's eyes danced. "Relax.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Dance

“Dreams are the language of God.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

God, Dreams

“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”

Russell Hoban (1925–2011) American British novelist, children's writer and illustrator

People

“Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbors Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

“The language of solace, and comets, and the girls we all become, in the end.”

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

Source: Someone Like You

Girl

“Harry: The most beautiful words in the English language aren't "I love you" but "it's benign."”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Love, Beauty

“Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

“Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

Change

“It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

World

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

Das Naturgesetz und die Struktur der Materie (1967), as translated in Natural Law and the Structure of Matter (1981), p. 34

Mathematics, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book Middlesex

Source: Middlesex

Feeling

“Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Women

“It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Friday

Source: Friday

People, Religion, Country

“He tried to learn seductive phrases in all languages, but the only Swedish he had ever really needed was, "Do you serve anything aside from pickled fish?" and "If you wrap me in furs, I can pretend to be your little fuzzy bear.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Runaway Queen

Fish, Learning

“Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

Life, Religion

“Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Suffering, Loss

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make sense any more.”

Coleman Barks (1937) American poet

World, Soul, Idea, Sense

“Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!”

Agatha Christie book Murder on the links

Source: The Murder on the Links

Girl, Fashion, Patience, Night

“The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Beauty

“I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears;”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

Love

“I can ask for cigarettes in every language”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

“Without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

pg. 27.
Against Method (1975)
Source: Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge

“Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: Merlin

Truth, Heart

“I don't like my language watered down, I don't like my edges rounded off.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Water

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) French writer and film director

Source: Summer Rain

Memory

“Never underestimate the value of knowing another's language. It can be far more powerful than swords and arrows.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

“I want it absolutely clear when I stand before the judgement bar of God that I declared to the world, in the most straightforward language I could summon, that the Book of Mormon is true.”

Jeffrey R. Holland (1940) Mormon leader

God, Books, World

“The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

“French is the language that turns dirt into romance.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Time (October 6, 1986)

“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

“Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

People, Time

“I cried in English, I cried in french, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

World, Tear

“Love and hate had their own secret languages, and Mark and Kieran were speaking in them now.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Love, Hate, Secret

“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Memory

“Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.”

Zadie Smith book NW

Source: NW

Sex

“I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.”

Anne Rice book The Queen of the Damned

Source: The Queen of the Damned

Women, Beauty

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Love

“Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.”

John Erskine (1879–1951) American educator

Music

“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

31 May 1830.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Context: The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Imagination