2,489 Quotes About Language

Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signsthey enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an imageas much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave

By sabotaging logic, the common frame of reference, and the common language, we have removed a "safety valve" that allows cultural divides to be resolved.

a hymn then not to birds but to words which themselves feel like feather and wing and light, as if it were on the delicacy of such sweet syllables that flocks take flight.

How much have we not seen or felt or heard because there was no word for it -- at least no word we knew? We speak to navigate ourselves away from dark corners and we become, each one of us, cartographers.

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.

I was born with my voice in my hands.