2,489 Quotes About Language

Sometimes we speak different languages, but our hearts are the same.

The language of nature is silence.

I'm online, therefore I am.

Words in the head are sticky and social creatures – when you finally pull one out, you're liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their palling around with other words.

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.

Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet.

To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.