Language Quotes - Page 24

• What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.

  Toni Morrison

  Sorry, Grief, Thinking

  "Toni Morrison: 'I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness'" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. April 13, 2012.

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• In this way they went on, and on, and on-in the language of the story-books-until at last the village lights appeared before them, and the church spire cast a long reflection on the graveyard grass; as if it were a dial (alas, the truest in the world!) marking, whatever light shone out of Heaven, the flight of days and weeks and years, by some new shadow on that solemn ground.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Book, Reflection

  Charles Dickens (1872). “Works of Charles Dickens”, p.123

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• Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Book, Reality, Psychics

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• It is silly to call fat people "gravitationally challenged", a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

  Terry Eagleton

  Silly, Frustration, Self

  The Guardian, October 27, 1992.

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• There seems to be an increasing awareness of something we Americans have known for some time - that the ten most dangerous words in the English language are "Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Helping, Awareness

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1991). “Ronald Reagan”

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• When you love a woman don't be bothered about what others have said about love, because that is going to be an interference. You love a woman, the love is there, forget all that you have learned about love. Forget all Kinseys, forget all Masters and Johnsons, forget all Freuds and Jungs. Please don't become a language professor. Just love the woman and let love be there, and let love lead you and guide you into its innermost secrets, into its mysteries. Then you will be able to know what love is.

  Rajneesh

  Love, Secret, Able

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• Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.

  Eric Bentley

  Communication, Ideas, Age

  New Republic 29 Dec. 1952

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• Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Communication, Exhausted, Speakers

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• The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

  Robert Burchfield

  Communication, Editors, Monsters

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• It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

  Raymond Chandler

  Baseball, Communication, Player

  Raymond Chandler (1995). “Later Novels & Other Writings”

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• Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Communication, Revolutionary, Rebellious

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.148, University of Chicago Press

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• A spoonful of humor makes the message go down easier.

  Frank Leahy

  Communication, Messages, Easier

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• Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

  Joseph Joubert

  Writing, Glasses, Fine Words

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• A thug only understands you when you speak his language

  Alexander Lukashenko

  Memorable, Thug, Speak

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• All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.

  Benjamin Jowett

  Effort, Compromise, Translations

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• To learn a new language is, therefore, always a sort of spiritual adventure; it is like a journey of discovery in which we find a new world.

  Ernst Cassirer

  Spiritual, Adventure, Journey

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• A translation can never equal the original; it can approach it, and its quality can only be judged as to accuracy by how close it gets.

  Gregory Rabassa

  Quality, Equal, Accuracy

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• In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Would Be, Study, Affair

  Ferdinand de Saussure (2013). “Course in General Linguistics”, p.8, A&C Black

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• The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

  Lewis Thomas

  Rest Of Life, Mark, Humans

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• A national language is a band of national union.

  Noah Webster

  Band, Unions, Translations

  Noah Webster (1951). “Dissertations on the English Language”

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• Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Communication, Men, Dumb

  A Left-Handed Commencement Address, delivered 22 May 1983, Mills College, Oakland, California

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• The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.

  Frederick Buechner

  World, Speak, Holy

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• I thought it was respectful to each country to sing in their language.

  Nana Mouskouri

  Country, Respectful

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• It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Book, Worst, Translations

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• The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

  Steven Pinker

  Baby, Age, Tourists

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