Language - Quotes

A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and world-view developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. - Lera Boroditsky
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed. - Marcel Proust

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open. - J. K. Rowling

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another. - John Dryden

For many people, language is inseparable from cultural identity since it is the means by which members of communities communicate with one another, and how individuals establish that they are, in fact, members of the same cultural community. - Lily Wong Fillmore

How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words. - Herbert Spencer

If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things. - Confucius

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart. - Nelson Mandela

In the acquisition of languages by direct study, where time can be afforded for the purpose, it is found that several languages, belonging to the same family – as the Latin, Italian, and Spanish, for instance – can be acquired together, almost as easily and rapidly, as either of them can be acquired separately, and with far less chance of their being lost from the memory of disuse. By finding the roots in the parent tongue, and by tracing the growth from these roots outward into different tongues, as it were genealogically, it is found that they descend and spread according to certain organic laws of modification and growth. - Horace Mann

It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man. - Fluke Greville

It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one. - Arthur Helps

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human. - Karl Marx

Language is a window to the world. - Susanna Zaraysky

Language is originally and essentially nothing but a system of signs or symbols, which denote real occurrences, or their echo in the human soul. - Carl Jung

Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions. - William Benton Clulow

Language is the dress of thought. - Samuel Johnson

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought. - Mark Hopkins

Language, which is the uniting bond and very medium of communion between men, is at the same time by the great variety of tongues, the means of severing and estranging nations more than anything else. - Horace Smith

One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way. - Frank Smith

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. - Toni Morrison

Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear.... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak. - Horace Mann

Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other. - Philip Dormer Stanhope

The ability to speak several languages is an asset, but the ability to keep your mouth shut in any language is priceless. - Unknown

The enterprise of describing something in language that has never been described before is a very difficult thing to do. When you decide to do away with old clichés or old phraseologies, and to come up with a new way of saying something, it's extremely difficult. - Gao XingJian

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don’t have access to most of human experience, and if you don’t have access to experience, then you’re not going to be able to think properly. - Noam Chomsky

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. - George Orwell

The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology. - Christian Nestell Bovee

The limits of my language are the limits of my world. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step. - Leonard Boomfield

The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous. - Maria Edgeworth

There’s no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds. - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore. - Ellen Gilchrist

Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savour their songs. - Nelson Mandela

Without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words? - Melina Marchetta