2,489 Quotes About Language

I've decided language isn't as advanced as we think it is. We're still apes trying to express our thoughts with grunts while most of what we want to communicate stays locked in our brains.

To understand a language is to understand thoughts.

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.

Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.

Every language has its own word for the sun, but the sun is always the same.

On the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

Un idioma es una tradición, un modo de sentir la realidad, no un arbitrario repertorio de símbolos.(A language is a tradition, a way of grasping reality, not an arbitrary assemblage of symbols.)

And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion. (It would also be possible to speak of an activity of butter when it rises in price, and if no problems are produced by this it is harmless.)