2,489 Quotes About Language

Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer from siderodromophobia. Having misgivings about your mother-in-law is pentheraphobia, and being petrified of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth is arachibutyrophobia. And then there’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s affliction, the fear of fear itself, or phobophobia.

Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.

On eût dit qu'en parlant un langage dont le caractère enfantin ne permettait pas qu'on le tînt pour un langage, elle donnait aux mots insignifiants l'aspect de mots incompréhensibles. Elle ne disait rien, mais ne rien dire était pour elle un mode d'expression trop significatif, au-dessous duquel elle réussissait à moins dire encore.

Whatever language we use use to describe healthy relationships, when we’re in them, we feel nourished by them, in body as well as mind.

How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others.

I always enjoyed studying languages and I learned from my Master that He wanted humans to be called Human Beings to continually remind them that they are really verbs and that their soul purpose is to BE. I think they tend to forget about this, they are so busy being nouns doing things that won't matter tomorrow.