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-William Faulkner
character Addie Bundren in
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A different language is a different vision of life.
-Federico Fellini
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Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
-Gustave Flaubert
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The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.
-John French
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How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
-Jack Gilbert
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Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.
-Johann von Goethe
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The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.
-Elizabeth Hardwick
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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
-Thomas Hardy
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Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
-Thomas Hardy
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This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.
-Vaclav Havel
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Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
-Martin Heidegger
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If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.
-Heinrich Heine
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The eyes have one language everywhere.
-George Herbert
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After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
-Russell Hoban
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Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
-Russell Hoban
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The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
-Douglas Hofstadter
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Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.
-Rosenstock Huessy
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To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.
-Victor Hugo
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Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.
-Victor Hugo
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But no language is perfect, no vocabulary is adequate to the wealth of the given universe, no pattern of words and sentences, however rich, however subtle, can do justice to the interconnected Gestalts with which experience presents us. Consequently the phenomenal forms of our name-conditioned universe are by nature delusory and fallacious. Wisdom comes only to those who have learned how to talk and read and write without taking language more seriously than it deserves. As the only begotten of civilization and even of our humanity, language must be taken very seriously. Seriously, too, as an instrument (when used with due caution) for thinking about the relationships between phenomena. But it must never be taken seriously when it is used, as in the old creedal religions and their modern political counterparts, as being in any way the equivalents of immediate experience or as being a source of true knowledge about the nature of things.
-Aldous Huxley
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Language is the pedigree of nations.
-Johnson
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Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.
-Ben Johnson
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Books about Language
