Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust,...

In our evolution language has been the greatest single contribution to our understanding and misunderstanding

I’m online, therefore I am.

Our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

The budget overrides the law. We have to target the budget and have language in [it] that prohibits that expenditure.

They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very...

As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In...

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what’s unique about language isn’t the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What’s unique about...

…it was another year or two before I discovered that drat and draft were different words. During that same period I remember believing that details were dentals and that a bitch was an extremely tall...

I don’t like to define my music. To me, music is pure emotion. It’s language that can communicate certain emotions and the rhythms cuts across genders, cultures and nationalities. All you need to do is...

You should take notes whenever you hear interesting or original language.

When two lovers discover a language of their own.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary...

Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain...

If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad,...

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?…I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that...

Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent.

Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.

Never mistake legibility for communication.

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

Contrary to what phenomenology- which is always phenomenology of perception- has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.

Vielleicht ist es so, dass nur das, was nicht ausgesprochen worden ist, durchlebt werden muss.

Now and again he spoke to those that served him and thanked them in their own language. They smiled at him and said laughing: ‘Here is a jewel among hobbits!

I love you” is because those three words represent 10% of the average man’s vocabulary.

I want to learn the language of the sun, and burn Agatha’s eyes out with my love poems.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best...

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Like night dreams, stores often use symbolic language, therefore bypassing the ego and persona, and traveling straight to the spirit and soul who listen for the ancient and universal instructions embedded there. Because of this...

No institution of learning of Ingersoll’s day had courage enough to confer upon him an honorary degree; not only for his own intellectual accomplishments, but also for his influence upon the minds of the learned...

If you listen to Sam Phillips and [Big Star producer] Jim Dickinson, their use of language is so beautiful,

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are ”prefabricated” in the sense that we...

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies.

… but I love language. It is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and language has power. Whether in a song lyric, a poem, a speech, or a simple conversation, we’ve all experienced words that resonate...

Nations that can manage to develop their language and make it accommondating while at the same time staying faithful to the roots of it are the most communicative societies that are also most dynamic in...

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky’s syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and...

Every language has its own word for the sun, but the sun is always the same.

Latin is already a dead language, man… don’t make it any deader.

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which...

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students’ use of the vocabulary they’re acquiring.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it....

Sign is a live, contemporaneous, visual-gestural language and consists of hand shapes, hand positioning, facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it...

A deaf and dumb in the mist of morons is a renowed talkative among brains.

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between...

I’ve built my homeland, I’ve even founded my state – in my language.

…to swear with a ferocity that can only be described as a talent.

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.

…hear the language, this English, double-jointed as Bedivere’s limbs. It only sounds awkward. In its ability to join one concept to another as with pegs, its dependent clauses, figures of speech and cadenced alliteration, a...