2,489 Quotes About Language

أتكلم أربع لغات بطلاقة، أفضلها عندي هي العربية، لغة القرآن والحديث، التي أعتز بها وأتمسك بحروفها مهما قيل عني

It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest....

A niechaj narodowie wżdy postronni znają,Iż Polacy nie gęsi, iż swój język mają.

It was impossible to quarrel with words, whose tremulous inequality showed indisposition so plainly.

What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilization.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don't change.

The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

The word for bank is the same, but the word for money changer is not, and while I have never learned the etymology behind this minor asymmetry I can imagine it represents centuries of cultural and ideological dissidence.

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing, but a compromise- that which is common to you, me, and everybody.