Language |
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in, so long as it is in an language I do not understand.
|
Edward Appleton(1892-1965, British physicist, winner of Nobel Prize, 1947) |
|
Rating: 1.20
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| By words the mind is winged.
|
Aristophanes(BC 448-380, Greek comic poet, satirist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
|
Antonin Artaud(1896-1948, French theater producer, actor, theorist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
|
Gaston Bachelard(1884-1962, French scientist, philosopher, literary theorist) |
|
Rating: 1.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
|
Aubrey Beardsley(1872-1898, British illustrator, writer) |
|
Rating: 2.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.
|
Robert Benchley(1889-1945, American humorist, critic, parodist) |
|
Rating: 4.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
|
Roland Barthes(1915-1980, French semiologist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
|
Roland Barthes(1915-1980, French semiologist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
|
Jean Baudrillard(French postmodern philosopher, writer) |
|
Rating: 2.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
|
Jean Baudrillard(French postmodern philosopher, writer) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
|
John Berger(1926-, British actor, critic) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| There is nothing in philosophy that could not be said in everyday language.
|
Henri L. Bergson(1859-1941, French philosopher) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
|
Louise Bogan(1897-1970, American poet, critic) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
|
Robert Burchfield(1923-, New Zealand scholar, lexicographer) |
|
Rating: 2.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.
|
Anthony Burgess(1917-1993, British writer, critic) |
|
Rating: 2.67
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Language is a virus from outer space.
|
William S. Burroughs(1914-1997, American writer) |
|
Rating: 1.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
|
William S. Burroughs(1914-1997, American writer) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it: 'Tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room
|
Jeremy Collier(1650-1726, British clergyman, conjuror) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
|
Italo Calvino(1923-1985, Cuban writer, essayist, journalist) |
|
Rating: 5.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
|
Joseph Conrad(1857-1924, Polish-born British novelist) |
|
Rating: 1.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
|
Elias Canetti(1905-1994, Austrian novelist, philosopher) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| By such innovations are languages enriched: when the words are adopted by the multitude and naturalized by custom.
|
Miguel De Cervantes(1547-1616, Spanish novelist, dramatist, poet) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| To have another language is to possess a second soul.
|
Charlemagne(742-814, King of the Franks, Emperor of the West) |
|
Rating: 3.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.
|
Charles V(1500-1558, Spanish King) |
|
Rating: 3.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| If English is spoken in heaven, God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.
|
Prince of Wales Charles |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
|
Noam Chomsky(1928-, American linguist, political activist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland -- and no other.
|
E. M. Cioran(1911-1995, Rumanian-born French philosopher) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
|
Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772-1834, British poet, critic, philosopher) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
|
James F. Cooper(1789-1851, American novelist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores this gain of our best glory shall be sent, T' enrich unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refin'd with th' accents that are ours?
|
Samuel Daniel |
|
Rating: 2.50
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
|
Clarence Darrow(1857-1938, American lawyer) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.
|
Rene Daumal(1908-1944, French poet, critic) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.
|
Sir Humphrey Davy(1778-1829, British chemist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.
|
Henri Delacroix |
|
Rating: 3.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
|
Andrea Dworkin(1946-, American feminist critic) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
|
Barbara Ehrenreich(1941-, American author, columnist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Language is the archives of history.
|
Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882, American poet, essayist) |
|
Rating: 2.44
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.
|
Claudius Galen(130-200, Physician born in Pergamus) |
|
Rating: 1.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.
|
Albert Einstein(1879-1955, German-born American physicist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Might, could, would -- they are contemptible auxiliaries.
|
George Eliot(1819-1880, British novelist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
|
George Eliot(1819-1880, British novelist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
|
Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882, American poet, essayist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
|
Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882, American poet, essayist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The language of truth is simple.
|
Euripides(BC 480-406, Greek tragic poet) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
|
Frantz Fanon(1925-1961, French psychiatrist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
|
Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790, American scientist, publisher, diplomat) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.
|
John French(1852-1925, British field marshal) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.
|
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe(1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist) |
|
Rating: 5.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.
|
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe(1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist) |
|
Rating: Not Rated
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
| Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
|
Oliver Wendell Holmes(1809-1894, American author, wit, poet) |
|
Rating: 2.00
|
Rate:
1
2
3
4
5
|
|
|
Do you want to have a unique software to store all the great quotations you've collected over the years?
Are you an author or student who wants to find the perfect quotes for your book or essay... quickly and easily?
Do you want to use the world's most popular quotation software absolutely free?
