2,489 Quotes About Language

A language is everything you do.

Sign is a live, contemporaneous, visual-gestural language and consists of hand shapes, hand positioning, facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body.

Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.

Pojąłem, że każdy świat ma własną tajemnicę i że dostęp do niej jest tylko na drodze poznania języka. <...> Rozumiałem, że im więcej będę znał słów, tym bogatszy, pełniejszy i bardziej różnorodny świat otworzy się przede mną.

Para el monolingüe no hay sino una lengua desde donde se piensa un solo mundo, y lo distinto siempre se da -si es que se da- peligrosamente: en traducción.

please don't cook me, kind sirs! I am a good cook myself, and cook better than I cook, if you see what I mean.

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this: Everything is connected. Everything. Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language.