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Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.
-Richard Chevenix Trench
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There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
-Mark Twain
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How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.
-Source Unknown
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The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
-Giambattista Vico
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests
-Gore Vidal
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Language is a dangerous tool, that when misused, can result in nonsense.
-Michael Wakcher
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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
-Derek Walcott
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We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
-Booker T. Washington
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Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
-Noah Webster
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A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
-Simone Weil
Human Personality 1943
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Numbers constitute the only universal language.
-Nathanael West
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An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
-Edith Wharton
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The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
-Walt Whitman
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We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
-Benjamin Lee Whorf
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Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
-Benjamin Lee Whorf
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We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
-Oscar Wilde
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As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
-George Will
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Poetry is the language of feeling.
-W. Winter
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If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
(attributed)
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Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
(attributed)
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Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
-Virginia Woolf
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Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
-William Butler Yeats
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Books about Language
