Human Language Quotes

• Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

  Noam Chomsky

  Animal, Unique, World

  Noam Chomsky (2006). “Language and Mind”, p.59, Cambridge University Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Language Words, Law, Generations

  Noam Chomsky (2003). “For Reasons Of State”, p.402, Penguin Books India

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Communication, Cities, Language And Power

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.160

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Communication, Thinking, Shapes

  88 Copy quote

• If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Communication, Different, World

  126 Copy quote

• Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Running, Communication, Inspiration

  58 Copy quote

• One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Judging, Language

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”, p.409, Penguin UK

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Business, Communication, Past

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). “The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Prose and Verse: Complete in One Volume”, p.313

  43 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.

  Noam Chomsky

  Animal, Language, Humans

  Source: libcom.org

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

  Dale Carnegie

  Inspirational, Motivational, Communication

  Dale Carnegie, Dorothy Carnegie (1977). “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking”, p.159, Simon and Schuster

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Men, Logic, Language

  84 Copy quote

• The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.

  Henri Delacroix

  Communication, Thought Provoking, Language

  45 Copy quote

• We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.

  Kofi Annan

  Acceptance, Race, Skin Color

  Twitter post from Sep 03, 2016

  374 Copy quote

  Show source

• Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution.

  Donald Johanson

  Art, Unique, Animal

  "How Will Humans Evolve?". bigthink.com. 2017.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind

  Noam Chomsky

  Character, Mind, Principles

  Noam Chomsky (2006). “Language and Mind”, p.90, Cambridge University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

  Garth Stein

  Language, Humans, Stills

  46 Copy quote

• A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

  Seymour Papert

  Learning, Thinking, Favors

  "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas". Book by Seymour Papert, 1980.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love.

  Paul Eluard

  Doe, Body, Flesh

  Paul Eluard, “At The Window”

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.

  David Abram

  Expression, Australia, Vitality

  David Abram (2012). “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World”, p.179, Vintage

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

  Charles Taylor

  Expression, Understanding, Identity

  Charles Taylor (1992). “The Ethics of Authenticity”, p.33, Harvard University Press

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

  Niels Bohr

  Independent, Judgement, Development

  Niels Bohr, Leon Rosenfeld (1999). “Collected works”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Men, Way, Language

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Homer A. Jack (2005). “The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi”, p.27, Courier Corporation

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.

  Malidoma Patrice Some

  Silence, Shadow, Language

  20 Copy quote

• To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

  Richard Rorty

  Age, Suggestions, Legacy

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

  W. H. Auden

  Language, Metaphorical, Humans

  3 Copy quote