Quotes
Quotes about Language
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
Under the tropic is our language spoke,
And part of Flanders hath receiv'd our yoke.
As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore.
Or if I would delight my private hours
With music or with poem, where so soon
As in our native language can I find
That solace?
Where Nature's end of language is declin'd,
And men talk only to conceal the mind.
Praise enough
To fill the ambition of a private man,
That Chatham's language was his mother tongue.
Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
And don't confound the language of the nation
With long-tailed words in osity and ation.
The languages, especially the dead,
The sciences, and most of all the abstruse,
The arts, at least all such as could be said
To be the most remote from common use.
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.
The English Bible,--a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
Spake full well, in language quaint and olden,
One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine,
When he called the flowers, so blue and golden,
Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine.
Flowers are Love's truest language.
But for the unquiet heart and brain
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise
Like dull narcotics numbing pain.
But what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.
Bad language or abuse
I never, never use,
Whatever the emergency;
Though "Bother it" I may
Occasionally say,
I never never use a big, big D.
Which I wish to remark,--
And my language is plain,--
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.
Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.
The communication media inflate language because they dare not be honest and call a spade a spade
It is best to regard the (English) language as a growing corpus of words and structures which nobody can know entirely but upon which anyone can draw at any time - a sort of unlimited bank account.
To learn a language is not to memorise a vocabulary but to acquire a set of rules
A language may be termed a dialect that waves a national flag
Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.
Sex often makes a language a minefield
Nothing capable of a moral assessment inheres in a language; it remains neutral and innocuous.
