2,489 Quotes About Language

It's now what enters men's mouths that's evil. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

... as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'.

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.

A rumor is usually a lie that the media can legally profit from.

A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. The inexpressible therefore is unknowable. By examining future stages in the evolution of language we come to learn what discoveries, changes and social revolutions the language will be capable, some day, of reflecting.

People: How many foreign languages do you speak?Me: I speak the language of honesty, which seems quite foreign to many people.

All my life I have been trying to improve my German.At last my German is better—but now I am old and ill and don’t have long to live.Soon I will be dead,with better German.

If I am honest I will admit that I have always wanted to avoid love. Yes give me romance, give me sex, give me fights, give me all the parts of love but not the simple single word which is so complex and demands the best of me this hour this minute this forever.

It's only words... unless they're true.