Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that it requires a great number of years...

To speak a language that was as intimate and free as certain dreams, saying darkly, thrillingly, My cock inside of you. Your come in my mouth … He focused on the boy’s slim, tight hips;...

Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely...

I haven’t any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring...

I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in...

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.

Words don’t always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go...

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in...

In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.

Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet...

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or...

Zanzotto ricorda che la nonna dialettofona, la nonna popolana recitava a lui piccolo versi familiari del Tasso, e quell’armonia del toscano illustre filtrava nella sua coscienza come “una vera e propria droga fonica, sopra il...

My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in...

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity...

The word is always a word for others. Words need to be heard. When wegive words to what we are living, these words need to be received andresponded to. A speaker needs a listener. A...

Every word is a prejudice.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express...

I personally am satisfied with that language,

Mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable,...

Spelling Bees are useless and unnecessary competitions. Before Microsoft Word and Google, Spelling Bees had value, but now they are all superflewus.

It is cognition that is the fantasy…. Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of...

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself...

I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

For many people around the world ethnicity is not a language, it is a religion.

Language is a ladder that always falls short of reality.

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once...

I think kids are excited by language, and they’re not always given credit for that.

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to...

Words simply mean what people think they mean when they say them.

Language is the art of experience

To creative people, the compendium of the white man’s dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say.

The subtleties of the mind cannot be transmitted in words, but can be seen in words.

Hay una estrella mas abiertaque la palabra ‘amapola’?Is there a star more wide openthan the word ‘poppy”?

[L]anguage functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others.

I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.

Know what you are talking about.

In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character....

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating … but there are other ways to understanding.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

He usually says either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and people think that’s because of the language barrier. I think that’s all he has to say. He’s as calm as anybody I’ve ever met.

Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.

modest changes in the Java language to support scientific computing

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There’s the wind,...

DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application....

The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end. And...