Quotes on Language

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.

Author: Kevin Anderson

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Author: Edward Appleton

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Author: Antonin Artaud

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

Author: J. Austin

The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing.

Author: Roger Babson

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

Author: Balthus

I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.

Author: Howard Barker

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

Author: Gregory Bateson

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Author: Charles Baudelaire

I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn.

Author: Stephanie Beacham

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Author: Aubrey Beardsley

There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.

Author: Henri Bergson

Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.

Author: Peter Bichsel

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

Author: Edward Bond

The one overall structure in my plays is language.

Author: Edward Bond

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Author: Elizabeth Bowen

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Author: Joseph Brodsky

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

Author: Joseph Brodsky

I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out.

Author: Terry Brooks

Language is a virus from outer space.

Author: William Burroughs

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.

Author: Emily Carr

It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.

Author: David Chalmers

The language you are about to hear... is disturbing.

Author: Dave Chappelle

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

Author: Noam Chomsky

Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

Author: Alonzo Church

Bunny boiler is now part of our language, and I'm proud of that.

Author: Glenn Close

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

Author: Leonard Cohen

It's always been easy with Mark, he's a rock fan and we speak the same language. He's a big Beatles fan too. We worked a lot via CLI calls, though only meeting up once every couple of months.

Author: Phil Collins

Though language forms the preacher, 'Tis good works make the man.

Author: Eliza Cook

Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.

Author: Mason Cooley

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.

Author: Christopher Dawson

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say.

Author: Jeffery Deaver

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

Author: Jacques Derrida

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen.

Author: Jacques Derrida

The Germans and I no longer speak the same language.

Author: Marlene Dietrich

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

Author: John Donne

The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.

Author: Helen Dunmore

I was always influenced by language.

Author: Helen Dunmore

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Author: George Eliot

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

Author: Ralph Emerson

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.

Author: Mari Evans

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

Author: Robert Fitzgerald

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

Author: Robert Fitzgerald

That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.

Author: Robert Fitzgerald

Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

Author: Robert Fitzgerald

Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.

Author: Harrison Ford

Nothing exists except through language.

Author: Hans-Georg Gadamer

My use of language is part and parcel of my message.

Author: Theo Gogh

I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality.

Author: Morris Graves

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

Author: Marilyn Hacker

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

Author: Marilyn Hacker

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

Author: David Hare

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

Author: John Hawkes

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

Author: William Hazlitt

We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.

Author: Buck Henry

Actually, my correspondent's language is better than mine. He can put his sentiment into words.

Author: Alfred Hershey

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

Author: Gilbert Highet

I'm not any good at foul language or anything like that.

Author: Thora Hird

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

Author: Howard Hodgkin

I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working.

Author: Alice Hoffman

I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried.

Author: Douglas Hyde

In the GNOME project we tried to keep the platform language independent.

Author: Miguel Icaza

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

Author: Wanda Jackson

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

Author: Roman Jakobson

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

Author: Roman Jakobson

Language is memory and metaphor.

Author: Storm Jameson

My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language.

Author: Elfriede Jelinek

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Author: Tahar Jelloun

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

Author: Franklin Jones

Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.

Author: Ben Jonson

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

Author: Martin King, Jr.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Author: Martin King, Jr.

It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word.

Author: Kevin Kline

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

Author: Donald Knuth

I think I developed language skills to deal with threat. It's the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun.

Author: Barbara Kruger

It was real Cheyenne. I would get the translations the night before, but it was very difficult because it was not like any other language you would be familiar with.

Author: Joe Lando

Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's difficult. But I discovered that it's easy because it's so brilliantly written. The words are perfect, and the language is intelligent and very emotional.

Author: Jessica Lange

Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt.

Author: Emma Lazarus

I think somebody who speaks the language is going to notice immediately that I'm not Russian.

Author: Nicholas Lea

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Author: Claude Levi-Strauss

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

Author: Flora Lewis

I know what the structure of the language is.

Author: Kurt Loder

Its language is as bare as a monk's cell, and as uninviting.

Author: Clifford Longley

Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it.

Author: Augustus Longstreet

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.

Author: Bela Lugosi

If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person.

Author: Frank Luntz

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.

Author: Thomas Lynch

I had said no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him about his saucy language. It had never gotten to this level until I came back.

Author: Andrea Mackris

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Author: Paul Man

Senator, we just don't use that kind of language on the floor of the Senate.

Author: Mike Mansfield

Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore.

Author: Yukihiro Matsumoto

I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story.

Author: John McGahern

All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate. My language to each of them has to suit their brain.

Author: Sam Mendes

Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only just the language of the Muslims, but it's also the language of the Hindus.

Author: Ismail Merchant

Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.

Author: James Merrill

But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.

Author: James Merrill

I feed on good soup, not beautiful language.

Author: Moliere

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

Author: Eugenio Montale

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

Author: Paul Muldoon

Language cares.

Author: Howard Nemerov

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

Author: Wilfred Owen

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

Author: Kenneth Pike

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?

Author: Kenneth Pike

A young man who is here speaks the Panis language, and in many other respects, is preferable.

Author: Zebulon Pike

There is a pride in speaking this language.

Author: Bernard Pivot

French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.

Author: Bernard Pivot

So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.

Author: Michael Polanyi

Metaphor is embodied in language.

Author: Dennis Potter

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Author: Ezra Pound

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Author: Ezra Pound

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Author: Terry Prachett

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

Author: Manuel Puig

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

Author: Robert Rauschenberg

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.

Author: Sam Rayburn

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

Author: Edward Sapir

It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.

Author: Edward Sapir

A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative.

Author: Edward Sapir

So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.

Author: Edward Sapir

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Author: Jose Saramago

Image is an international language.

Author: Marjane Satrapi

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

Author: Ferdinand Saussure

The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.

Author: Ferdinand Saussure

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

Author: Ferdinand Saussure

The form language used by the ancient Egyptians in their structures is minimal.

Author: Harry Seidler

In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language.

Author: Hu Shih

Language changes very fast.

Author: John Smith

We may come to Jesus and ask Him; He will know all about it; if He comes to a little child, he will adapt himself to the language and capacity of a little child.

Author: Joseph Smith, Jr.

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

Author: Robert Smithson

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

Author: Robert Smithson

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.

Author: Stephen Sondheim

Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies.

Author: Peter Sotos

If I have to do something, I feel I should do it perfectly, and ofcourse, Hindi language is a problem.

Author: Soundarya

Speech happens to not be his language.

Author: Madame Stael

I said in sharp language that that practice was wrong.

Author: Ken Starr

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Author: George Steiner

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Author: Robert Stevenson

I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.

Author: Karlheinz Stockhausen

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language.

Author: William Strunk, Jr.

I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating.

Author: Andy Summers

I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.

Author: Quentin Tarantino

Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Author: Lewis Thomas

The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs.

Author: Arthur Waite

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Author: Andrzej Wajda

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

Author: Larry Wall

If you can not master your language you must be it's slave.

Author: Jenny Weber

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Author: Simone Weil

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

Author: Nathanael West

Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language.

Author: Timothy West

What language are you talking in now? It appears to be bollocks.

Author: Richard Wilson

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

Author: Jeanette Winterson