Quotes, aphorisms and phrases about language, or about the human ability to communicate through sounds articulated and organized in words, in order to define images and discern conventional relationships that vary in time and space.
Quotes about language
- Two interesting situations: when the thought goes faster than the language, when the language goes faster than the thought. The worst is when thought and language go hand in hand: boredom begins there. (Jean Baudrillard)
- Dance is the hidden language of the soul. (Martha Graham)
- Whoever has language, has the world. (Hans-Georg Gadamer)
- Conceptual thinking was born hand in hand with language. (Konrad Lorenz)
- Language is the source of misunderstandings. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
- Language is more to the mind than light is to the eye. (William Gibson)
- Words mean man's refusal to accept the world as it is. (Walter Kaufmann)
- Language is not only the vehicle of a communication, but becomes the object of an interpretation. (Paul Ricoeur)
- The analysis of the edifying language of others led me to this conclusion: speaking was an act of creation but also of destruction. It was better to be very careful with this invention. (Amélie Nothomb)
- Philosophy is a battle against the deception of our intelligence through the meaning of language. (Antoine De Saint Exupery)
Recommended readings- Phrases about habit: aphorisms, quotes
- Phrases about revenge: aphorisms, quotes
- Speed phrases: aphorisms, quotes
- Phrases on clothes: aphorisms, quotes
- Phrases on boredom: aphorisms, quotes
- Language is the mother, not the handmaid of thought. (Karl Kraus)
- Language is the medium in which the interlocutors understand each other and in which the understanding of the thing occurs. (Hans Georg Gadamer)
- The tongue will also be a deforming mirror, but it is the only mirror we have. (Michael Dummett)
- Language is the arsenal of the human mind, and at the same time it contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- Thought is the flower; the language the bud, the action the fruit that will be born. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- The supernatural comes from language: it is the consequence and the proof of it together. (Tzvetan Todorov)
- Language is the friendliest of the things we can't escape from. (Mason Cooley)
- The language of friendship is not made of words but of meanings. (Henry David Thoreau)
- There is no way of action, nor a form of emotion, which we do not share with inferior animals. Is it only through language that we are superior to them, or to each other? through language, which is the father and not the son of thought. (Oscar Wilde)
- The phenomenon of madness, for man, cannot be separated from language. (Jacques Lacan)
- Man is a syntactic animal and language is a separate faculty of the human mind. (Noam Chomsky)
- A poet is, first of all, a person who is passionately in love with language. (W.H.Auden)
- Language, before meaning something, means to someone. (Jacques Lacan)
- Philosophy is a battle against the witchcraft of our intelligence by means of language. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
- You don't live in a country, you live in a language. (Emile Michel Cioran)
- The language was not powerful enough to describe the childhood phenomenon. (Charles Dickens)
- We rarely regret talking little; very often to talk too much: maximum and popular maxim, which everyone knows and nobody takes into account. (Jean de La Bruyère)
- Man is not a creature on earth who has language, man is language. (Herbert Marshall McLuhan)
- Language is an imprint, the major imprint of our human condition. (Octavio Paz)
- Language is something organic, it changes and evolves. It is not closed in an ivory tower. (E.L.James)
- A revolt is basically the language of those who are not listened to. (Martin Luther King)
- Language serves not only to express thought, but to make possible thoughts that would not exist without it. (Dan Simmons)
- Language is the home of the truth of being. (Martin Heidegger)
- The hypothesis that language is formally and substantially the core of philosophy, that the limits of our world are those of our language, that all access to the existential is, in the final analysis, linguistic, is purely modern. (George Steiner)
- Linguist. A person who knows how to theorize about other people's languages much more than he can use his own. (Ambrose Bierce)
Aphorisms on language
- The analysis of the edifying language of others led me to this conclusion: speaking was an act of creation but also of destruction. It was better to be very careful with this invention. (Amélie Nothomb)
- Language is the clothing in which your thoughts parade in public. Never dress them in vulgar or poor clothes. (George W. Crane)
- Isn't it fascinating that thought cannot exist without language? (Paul Auster)
- It can be observed how the class of those who make the laws speak their own language or dialect that no one else understands. All laws are written in this language and they actively work to increase the number. (Jonathan Swift)
- The language of truth is simple. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- Because last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await a new voice. (Thomas Stearns Eliot)
- Thought and language are the tools of his art for the artist. (Oscar Wilde)
- Nothing is more incomprehensible than the speeches of people for whom language serves nothing more than to make themselves understood. (Karl Kraus)
- Do not put a brake on the tongue when you seek the truth. (Publilio Siro)
- The language should be the joint creation of poets and workers. (George Orwell)
- Our ordinary language is too poor and even too indeterminate to be able to express the delicate, precise and content-rich relationships of mathematical science. (Henry Poincaré)
- Good writers are those who keep language efficient. That is to say, that keep it accurate, clear. (Ezra Pound)
- The communication of ideas requires a similarity of thought and language. (Edward Gibbon)
- Language is a mixture of declaration and evocation. (Elizabeth Bowen)
- Anyone with an ear for language recognizes how subtle and permeable to fashions is the boundary that separates the pretentious vocabulary of psychiatry from the ridiculous lexicon of the psycho-chitter, and both from the jargon of everyday life. (Thomas Stephen Szasz)
- If crimes against language like those against society were condemned, the world would be a vast prison. (Robert Sabatier)
- The whole philosophy can be considered as a critique of language. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
- The function of language is not to inform, but to evoke. (Jacques Lacan)
- Learning sign language takes years, if not decades, of training. (David Frankel)
- Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art, the result of the creativity of thousands of generations. (Edward Sapir)
- Language is not only a means of expressing our thoughts, but also an efficient tool with which to think. (Humphry Davy)
- Poetry is always about language. It shows us that language is fragile, magical, unreliable, arbitrary, but unlike a philosophical essay on these topics, it does not allow us to respond. (Richard Bradford)
- The biggest thing about human language is that it prevents us from standing still on the current issue. (Lewis Thomas)
- Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the way in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. The interpretation and use of words also involves a process of free creation. (Noam Chomsky)
- Men invented language to satisfy their unsustainable need to always complain. (Lily Tomlin)
- Language is a form of human reason, with an internal logic of which men know nothing. (Claude Lévi Strauss)
- We wished, we should have, we could have. The most painful words of the language. (Jonathan Coe)
- Language, this exquisitely human invention, can allow for what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us - even those who are blind from birth - to see through the eyes of another. (Oliver Sacks)
- The poetic language of an era should be the intensified current language. (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
- With each word, language promises the value that things would have only if no language around them was necessary. (Franz Josef Czernin)
- The discovery of fire, probably the greatest ever made by man, except language, precedes the dawn of history. (Charles Robert Darwin)
- The limits of my language constitute the limits of my world. All I know is what I have words for. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
- High thoughts must have high language. (Aristophanes)
- There are no clearer words than body language once you have learned to read it. (Alexander Lowen)
- Thought is the flower; the language the bud, the action the fruit that will be born. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Phrases about language
- Isn't it fascinating that thought cannot exist without language? (Paul Auster)
- It is the writer's duty to dig with language, to scrape near the bone. (Stephen King)
- But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. (George Orwell)
- The boundaries of my language are the borders of my world. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
- We will never understand each other until we have reduced our language to no more than seven words. (Khalil Gibran)
- If you want to get people moving, learn to use body language effectively. (Harvey B. Mackay)
- We use ideas simply to hide our wickedness, and speech simply to hide our ideas. (Voltaire)
- Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and can, as a rule, be expressed in language understandable to everyone. (Albert Einstein)
- It seems to me that translating from one language to another, if not from the queens of languages, Greek and Latin, is like looking at the Andalusian tapestries from the reverse: even if you see the figures, they are full of threads that make them confused, lacking the smoothness and sharpness of the law. (Miguel de Cervantes)
- Poetry is the concentrate of the power of language, that is, of our original relationship with the universe. (Adrienne Rich)
- I only dominate the language of others. Mine does me what it wants. (Kark Kraus)
- There is no way of acting or form of emotion that humans do not share with lower animals. It is only through language that we rise above them and one above the other - through language that is the father, and not the son, of thought. (Oscar Wilde)
- The language of love is in the eyes. (John Fletcher)
- Language is the habit of thought. (Samuel Johnson)
- Language is a maze of roads, you come from one side and you know how to orient yourself, you reach the same point on the other side and you don't find your way anymore. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
- Language is the home of the truth of being. (Martin Heidegger)
- It is ironic that precisely through language a man can degrade himself below the level of those who have no language! (Soren kierkegaard)
- The salt of stories is the property of language. (Miguel De Cervantes)
- Man behaves as if he were the modeler and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of Man. (Martin Heidegger)
- Religions are transmitted culturally, through language and symbolism, certainly not through genes. (Daniel Dennett)
- Language operates entirely in ambiguity, and most of the time you know absolutely nothing about what you say. (Jacques Lacan)
- The only universal language is kiss. (Alfred De Musset)
- Language is the most imperfect and expensive means that has ever been discovered to communicate thought. (William James)
- The truth has a simple language and you don't have to complicate it. (Euripides)
- True creativity often begins where language ends. (Arthur Koestler)
- Differences in habits and languages do not count if our intentions are identical and our hearts open. (J.K.Rowling)
- No mouth is big enough to pronounce the whole thing. (Alan Wilson Watts)
