To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the...

ll our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters” from other tongues and cultures.

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see...

But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a...

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.

Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It’s just passing information and sometimes very superficial...

Es ist nicht die Sprache, die den Menschen zum Menschen macht, sondern die Sprache der anderen.

It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don’t work that way. French? Dieu!...

The Biblical language was so deeply embedded in the great man’s mind that it became his normal way of speaking.

Actualmente, hablamos de lenguajes en plural, por tanto, de lenguajes cuyo significante no es la palabra: por ejemplo, el lenguaje del cine, de las artes figurativas, de las emociones, etcétera. Pero éstas son acepciones metafóricas....

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

Le lingue evolvono nel senso della pigrizia.

Language has been mobilised and sent into battle; it directs the human carnage of conflict with its enunciation of emotion, stimulating souls to abandon peace.

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree’, or `that is a banyan tree’, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so...

The most self-damaging words in the English language are: try, might, and if. These are words of uncertainty. Will you fail? That is possible. But continue doubting your abilities and you’ll never succeed.

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained...

You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today’s heritage and our new...

From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.

The Chinese side does not advocate using this kind of language in international relations.

The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

‘Your brain doesn’t process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea.’ ‘I have a superior brain?’ ‘Uh,’ Eliot said, ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

German is a much more precise language than English. Americans throw the word love around for everything: I love my wife! I love all my friends! I love rock music! I love the rain! I...

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.

S’mimasen,” Alyss said repeatedly as they brushed against passerby. “What does that mean?” Will asked as they reached a stretch of street bare of any other pedestrians. He was impressed by Alyss’s grasp of the...

..all subjects are forms of discourse and that, therefore, almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is...

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I’m dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

A rumor is usually a lie that the media can legally profit from.

For us, being married to each other is the most valuable thing in the world. It’s the only language people understand.

To speak only one language is to do yourself a great injustice.

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

L’argot n’est autre chose qu’un vestiaire où la langue, ayant quelque mauvaise action à faire, se déguise. Elle s’y revêt de mots masques et de métaphores haillons.

Raymond collected expressions. He repeated them in experimental accents, as if learning a tune. He sounded like an Eighteenth Street Mexican when he said cuate, like a Logan Square cubano when he said comemierda.

enriched” by all this.

It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. “I hate this language. It changes too often!

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to… The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.

It seems Palestinians can’t win. The language of peace negotiations has always been predicated on a representation that Palestinians are violent and that is why Israel behaves as it does.

If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved...

English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one...

Here’s what I mean by the miracle of language. When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and...

What really matters is:—1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.2. Always prefer the plain direct word to...

Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the...