I do not mind what language an opera is sung in, so long as it is in a language I do not understand.
—Edward Victor Appleton (1892–1965) English Physicist
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!
—Philip Roth (1933–2018) American Novelist, Short-story Writer
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
—Noah Webster (1758–1843) American Lexicographer, Journalist, Author
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.
—Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German Poet, Writer
Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist
Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness.
—Richard Bach (b.1936) American Novelist, Aviator
The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-born British Philosopher
Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one’s mother’s womb.
—Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-born British Philosopher
Language is the archives of history.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
You must answer the devil in his own language.
—Indian Proverb
There is no such thing as the Queen’s English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
—Douglas R. Hofstadter (b.1945) American Cognitive Scientist, Author
A different language is a different vision of life.
—Federico Fellini (1920–93) Italian Filmmaker
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-born British Philosopher
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
—Frantz Fanon (1925–61) French-Martinique Psychoanalyst, Philosopher
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
—George Orwell (1903–50) English Novelist, Journalist
The common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts; they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial; if anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education—sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
—Stephen King (b.1947) American Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Screenwriter, Columnist, Film Director
Numbers constitute the only universal language.
—Nathanael West
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French Actor, Drama Theorist
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-born British Philosopher
Language is the pedigree of nations.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-born British Novelist
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German Existential Philosopher
Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.
—Unknown
Language is like amber in its efficacy to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but which, in the course of ages, have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination.
—George Augustus Henry Sala (1828–95) British Journalist