2,489 Quotes About Language

For words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.

How many Germans "live" who speak their mother tongue effortlessly and yet are unable to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or one of Hölderlin's hymns! Hence whoever has mastered the Greek language, or has some acquaintance with it by accident or choice, possess not the least proof thereby that he is able to think according to the thought of a Greek thinker.

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.

Waves come with messages from the sea; they touch the shore with their sublimity. Leaves fall with messages from the trees; they fall on the ground with their magic. Nature sends us the most beautiful messages. We just need to understand the language of the waves and the leaves.

The Almost Forgotten Human Language is ‘Feeling.

Using the psychological language—Some people are less rational than others because they are caught up in BEING instead of focusing in BECOMING too. Time is continuous.

Louisa was left to wonder how grown men found the smallest words the most difficult ones to say. “Thanks,” “please,” “sorry”… From the way their tongues tripped over the syllables, you’d think those words were Latin names for species of exotic fungi. When it came to “love,” some of them lost the power of speech altogether.

Words simply mean what people think they mean when they say them.

Language is for itself the order of the Same. The world is its Other. The attestation of this otherness arises from language's reflexivity with regard to itself, whereby it knows itself as being in being in order to bear on being.