Language Quotes - Page 3

• 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

  Truth, Real, Political Language

  "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

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• Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

  Sarah Caldwell

  Inspiring, Graduation, Gratitude

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

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Men, Logic, Reason

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• It's my language, the language I speak. I've spent a lot more time playing music than talking or writing.

  Nitin Sawhney

  Writing, Talking, Playing Music

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• But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

  George Orwell

  Inspirational, Life, Political Language

  "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

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• The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

  John Muir

  Stars, Eye, Wind

  John Muir (2010). “The Wilderness Journeys”, Canongate Books

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• Numbers constitute the only universal language.

  Nathanael West

  Communication, Math, Numbers

  1933 Miss Lonely hearts.

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  Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Honesty, Integrity, Writing

  1847; quoted by propagandist and language maven William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 13 December 1998.

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• Language is wine upon the lips.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wine, Tongue, Lips

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• Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

  Paul de Man

  Mean, Doe, Enough

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• There's an aspect of human nature in which we want to think we're better than somebody else. They're a different color. They speak a different language. They have a different name for the Creator. Whatever it is, that makes it okay for me to hate them, to try to get some of their land or some of their resources.

  John Denver

  Hate, Thinking, Color

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• We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.

  Buck Henry

  Political, President, Needs

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

  Walter Benjamin

  Information, Hallmark, Function

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Long, Age

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.107, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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• By reading keep in a state of excited igorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself.Don't know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world.

  Mark Twain

  Children, Reading, Men

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• A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

  Ezra Pound

  Age, Literature, Translations

  John Patrick Sullivan, Ezra Pound, Sextus Propertius (1964). “Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: a study in creative translation”

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• I would not rob you of your food or your clothes or your umbrella, but if I caught your German out I would take it. But I don't study any more,- I have given it up.

  Mark Twain

  Clothes, Study, Umbrella

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.143, Courier Corporation

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• We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Character, Adequate, Leafs

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• [On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.

  Mark Twain

  Jugs, Dutch, Milk

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• I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Angel, Experts

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• I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

  Mark Twain

  Wells, Maniacs, Interpreter

  Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.3252, GENERAL PRESS

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• The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.

  Leonardo Sciascia

  Sides, Said, Tapestry

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• ...the circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.

  Mark Twain

  Atmosphere, Kind, Conversation

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.68, Courier Corporation

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• It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

  Mark Twain

  Running, German Language, Brain

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.142, Courier Corporation

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• Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of language.

  Samuel Johnson

  Enlargement, Stability, Quotations

  'A Dictionary of the English Language' (1755) preface (on citations of usage in a dictionary)

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