2,489 Quotes About Language

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

As long as one is ruled by illusion, one’s thinking process is also illusory and that is nothing but misery. In Gnanis’ [the enlightened one’s] language, there is no such thing as happiness or unhappiness.

When observation fails to align with a truth, what do you trust--your senses or your truth? The Greeks didn't even have a word for blue. The color didn't exist to them. Couldn't see it without a word for it.I think about her all the time. My stomach flips when I see her. But is it love, or just something we don't have a word for?

But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.

The deterioration of any language is the decay of any moral society where in the language resides. If people don’t know how to communicate or are limited within their own language, then they will act merely on impulse. People’s shortcuts are ultimately their undoing.

Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee.