c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Wisdom is finding out that a cobra is deadly
—  without first having to lose one’s life.
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Statesmanship is developed in the hard knocks of general experience, private and public.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
In a number of workshops, I have asked people whether they have had one or more experiences that they would identify as an experience of God and, if so, to share them in small groups. On average, 80 percent of the participants identify one or more and are eager to talk about them. They also frequently report that they had never before been asked that question in a church setting or given an opportunity to talk about it.
— Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith
Don't say NO for an answer
— Ericson Eusebio
She will prolong her life by the length of her story, even though time will wear on inexorably as she tells it, thus depriving her of the chance to have a new experience.
— Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.
— Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
Education is like a seed, that when watered with knowledge and experience, grows into true wisdom.
— Richard S. Hartmetz
Enlightenment, awakening or liberation can never be attained by seeking or desiring. It is realized only through experience.
— Gian Kumar
Life is like the clouds we see everyday.The dark,white patches and its mixtures.These are what we see and experience everyday.
— Seyi Ayoola
Love is like a plant...; some are planted, while other are germinated...!
— Sudeep Prakash Sdk
It's only when you learn, live and give sincere service that you can experience life's deepest fulfillment and true joy
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
My attention determines the depth and quality of my experience.
— Karen Kingston, Creating Sacred Space With Feng Shui
What you end up experiencing is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in.
— Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.
— Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenityAnd the wisdom of age? Had they deceived usOr deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secretsUseless in the darkness into which they peeredOr from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited valueIn the knowledge derived from experience.The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been. We are only undeceivedOf that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience.
— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Can you hold happiness? Can you drink it? Can you taste it? Can you touch it? Of course not, it is immaterial. So, stop looking for it in the material world! Happiness is experienced within; when we bridge the gap between what we want to experience and how we choose to behave.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Laziness always wins.
— Tibor Fischer, Good To Be God
For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.
— George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter
The thing no one understood about Gwendolyn Reese was that she was three ages at once: thirty chronologically, forty-five intellectually and fifteen experientially.
— Marilyn Brant, A Summer In Europe
Experience can not be improvise
— Natalia Lizardo
It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man.
— Michael James Jackson
God, he was probably too young to be this old, but life had a way of being about experience, rather than calendar days.
— J.R. Ward, Lover at Last
If there is anything unique about the human animal, it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience.
— John N. Gray
When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Focus on what's ahead. Use what is behind.
— Donita K. Paul, DragonSpell
The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are.
— Kristin Hannah, Angel Falls
Explore, experience, evolve, and exceed your expectations! - No Excuses!
— Lorii Myers, No Excuses, The Fit Mind-Fit Body Strategy Book
Happiness, Success, Excellence: They are not something you get for knowing the path; they are something you experience by walking it.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice
—  reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard
We must do business in great waters; we must be really on the deck in a storm, if we would see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. We must have stood side by side with King David; we must have gone down into the pit to slay the lion or have lifted up the spear against the eight hundred, if we would know the saving strength of God's right hand. Conflicts bring experience, and experience brings that growth in grace which is not to be attained by any other means.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Gleanings Among the Sheaves
Experiences is just paying attention as time passes.
— Erin McKean, The Secret Lives of Dresses
A bitter experience makes us a better person.
— Saru Singhal, Rousing Cadence
Stop focusing on what you don’t want; it’s a tremendous waste of time and energy. Instead, start focusing on what you do want. This is the only way to create a plan of action which will enable you to experience the life you envision.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Do not be too sure, young fellows,That you are better than your ancestors.
— William Kean Seymour, The Cats of Rome: New and Selected Poems
The real success is experiencing the bitters of life rather more than sweets.
— Dirah
Knowing that you are perfect as you are does not mean you will no longer grow. It means that everything you've experienced up to this moment has made you who you are, and that is perfection. Tomorrow, you will be an even more perfect version of yourself.
— Julie-Anne
I was going to dine at the television company’s expense with one of the most beautiful women in show business and some television producer with an inferiority complex. In my experience, there’s always a price.
— V.T. Davy, Black Art
Spirituality is the poetry of our experience. Science is the gauge of our reality. Together, they create the essence of our humanity.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Time and suffering are inseperable. In life, as in physics, both are the common denominator of all experiences.
— Christopher  Dutton
We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.
— John Dewey
There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses. And if we doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to these senses – ribelli ad essi sensi – such as the existence of God or of the soul or similar things over which there is always dispute and contention. And in fact it happens that whenever reason is wanting men to cry out against one another, which does not happen with certainties. For this reason we shall say that where the cry of controversy is heard, there is no true science, because the truth has one single end and when this is published, argument is destroyed for ever.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.Scruples are alien to the black panther.Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.The self-critical jackal does not exist.The locust, alligator, trichina, horseflylive as they live and are glad of it.The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.
— Wisława Szymborska
It is one thing to understand the gospel but is quite another to experience the gospel in such a way that it fundamentally changes us and becomes the source of our identity and security.
— J.D. Greear, Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary
When you've spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it's not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn't, and how little time there is to learn the difference.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
a man only knows what he's experienced
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you buy your experience it's your own. So it's no matter how much you pay for it.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can't put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning - Who are we, where do we fit in, where are we going?
— Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast
I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.
— Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
— W. Somerset Maugham
If the sky falls, there'll be a bigger sky behind it.
— Marty Rubin
...don't settle for pap - our thoughts wander through eternity - experience the wonder of being alive...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.
— Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
God impressed me with this a long time ago: 'Roddy, I will never do anything through you until I have done it to you!'."~R. Alan Woods [1998]
— R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is The Destination: A Photo Journal
This divergence of experience was not a stumbling block to conversation; indeed, it was what made the conversation interesting.
— Michael David Lukas, The Oracle of Stamboul
‎"You are the author for your life and you only get one chance to leave a beautiful mark.
— L.M. Fields
when you fall into a pit, you either die or get out.
— fitri puji astutik
You and I have been created with a DNA that drives us to want to live a life with good experiences, forces us to human growth and leads us to the contribution of something beyond our understanding.
— Yovanny Alfonso
Now, we see what we are shown. We have gotten used to being shown no matter what, within or beyond the limited range of human sight. This habituation to the monopoly of visualization-on-command strongly suggests that only those things that can in some way be visualized, recorded, and replayed at will are part of reality...The result is a strange mistrusts of our own eyes, a disposition to take as real only that which is mechanically displayed in a photograph, a statistical curve, or a table. Eyewitness testimony must be "substantiated" by records that have been acquired, and can be stored and then shown.
— Barbara Duden
Strange how something good can come from something horrible.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
In my limited realm of experience, beginnings led to endings.
— Ellen Hopkins, Burned
I believe in me. And my family does. And Mrs. V. It's the rest of the world I'm not so sure of.
— Sharon M. Draper, Out of My Mind
Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules?
— Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot
I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.
— Lord Dunsany, The Curse Of The Wise Woman
Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.
— John Dewey, Experience and Nature
[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
— Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
Wisdom isn't built on experience
—  it's built on reason...
Life was never intended to consist of a glut of luxury, be an easy course, or filled only with success. There are those games which we lose, those races in which we finish last, and those promotions which never come. Such experiences provide an opportunity for us to show our determination and to rise above disappointment.
— Thomas S. Monson
My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only for himself. Now there is no meaning for a lone individual: bing alone would of itself reject the "private being" if it saw it as such (if I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning which he alone would perceive, from which life in its entirety would escape, except within himself). At the extreme limit of the "possible", it is true, there is nonsense . . . but only of that which had a prior sense: this is fulguration, even "apotheosis" of nonsense. But I don't attain the extreme limit on my own and, in actual fact, I can't believe the extreme limit attained, for I never remain there. If I had to be the only one having attained it (assuming that I had . . .), it would be as thought it had not occurred. For if there subsisted a satisfaction, as small as I can imagine it to be, it would distance me as much from the extreme limit. I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate.~George Bataille, "Inner Experience" pg. 42
— Georges Bataille
Experience teaches is such a lovely saying. However, when people try not to make the mistakes of what history and experience has taught, they are criticized for it. They are told that because they have not experienced it, they cannot appreciate it, and thus never know it. However, at the same time, people want you to learn from past mistakes and past experiences, in order to make a better choice for yourself. So let me ask you, which is the hypocrite? Is it history or is it today?
— Lionel Suggs
Pains are not to be relievedSorrows are not to fade awaya slight change in the visionmay bring a new experience
— Rixa White
If we can widen the range of experiences beyond what we as individuals have encountered, if we can draw upon the experiences of others who've had to confront comparable situations in the past, then - although there are no guarantees - our chances of acting wisely should increase proportionately.
— Edward Hallett Carr
When comparing 100 years of experience to 1, there is a way to close the gap. One must simply understand the choices that were taken, the roads that were walked, and that there are no guarantees to an unseen future.
— Lionel Suggs
Dangerously close to having to work for a living.
— Rosen Topuzov
Life truly is precious. Gather every moment of it into your arms & embrace it.
— Paula Abdul
You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.
— Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War
In AA we don’t come to God through theology but through experience, mostly of the humbling and humiliating variety, often reluctantly, and sometimes even kicking and screaming. – p. 179
— Ray A., Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety
silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
— George Orwell, 1984
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very
—  otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
— Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder
I like you; your eyes are full of language."[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]
— Anne Sexton
Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?
— Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock
From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
— Nelson Mandela
Instead of the word 'love' there was an enormous heart, a symbol sometimes used by people who have trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes.
— Lemony Snicket, The Carnivorous Carnival
It wasn't that Henry was less of himself in English. He was less of himself out loud. His native language was thought.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King
From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
— Winston S. Churchill
He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From the dog owners I learned "Lie down," "Shut up," and "Who shit on this carpet?" The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. "Is thems the thoughts of cows?" I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window. "I want me some lamb chop with handles on 'em.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Language is a virus from outer space
— William S. Burroughs
It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
— George Orwell
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
— Aldous Huxley
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Language is the only homeland.
— Czesław Miłosz
Language is the source of misunderstandings.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.
— Madeleine L'Engle
...to swear with a ferocity that can only be described as a talent.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
The fact that Iam writing to youin Englishalready falsifies what Iwanted to tell you.My subject:how to explain to you that Idon't belong to Englishthough I belong nowhere else
— Gustavo  Perez Firmat, Bilingual Blues
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
If this hast been done to language, I fear to know the fate of all else.
— Michael J. Sullivan, Theft of Swords
It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him contentedly munching on his Rice Krispies, waiting for the right juncture for launchtime.He looked up at her briefly and smiled, and she realized something important. This was how they both liked it. Though most people felt bonded by conversation, Lena and Bapi were two of a kind who didn’t. They bonded by the routine of just eating cereal together.She promptly forgot her script and went back to her cereal.At one point, when she was down to just milk, Bapi reached over and put his hand on hers. ‘You’re my girl,’ he said.And Lena knew she was.
— Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something
— G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.
— Alan Moore
I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out. 
— Katherine Dunn
What said those two souls communicating through the language of the eyes, more perfect than that of the lips, the language given to the soul in order that sound may not mar the ecstasy of feeling? In such moments, when the thoughts of two happy beings penetrate into each other’s souls through the eyes, the spoken word is halting, rude, and weak—it is as the harsh, slow roar of the thunder compared with the rapidity of the dazzling lightning flash, expressing feelings already recognized, ideas already understood, and if words are made use of it is only because the heart’s desire, dominating all the being and flooding it with happiness, wills that the whole human organism with all its physical and psychical powers give expression to the song of joy that rolls through the soul. To the questioning glance of love, as it flashes out and then conceals itself, speech has no reply; the smile, the kiss, the sigh answer.
— José Rizal, Noli Me Tángere
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul
— Socrates
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.
— Stephen Fry
Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.
— Alexandre Dumas
What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on.
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.
— Kathy Griffin
When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love's adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.
— نزار قباني
With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
— Iris Murdoch
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
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.
— Amy Tan
I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)
— Jodi Picoult, House Rules
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 Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!
— Eddie Izzard, Definite Article
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
— Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
Humor is a universal lanuage.
— Joel Goodman
Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. 
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness' sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.
— Bernard Levin
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
— Charlemagne
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
— Susan Sontag, In America
First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.
— Peter Ellis
A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fanciesthat have moulded them
— Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
Alice thought to herself, 'Then there's no use in speaking.' The voices didn't join in this time, as she hadn't spoken, but to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means--for I must confess that I don't), 'Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.
— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.
— Pádraic Pearse
The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.
— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
— Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon
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 it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
— George Orwell, 1984
Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.
— Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
Sometimes, language is the sound of longing
— Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love
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!
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time.
— Stephen Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes
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 language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.
— Temple Grandin
And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.
— Chris Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness
I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold
Latin is already a dead language, man... don't make it any deader.
— Jerry Scott
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
— George Orwell, 1984
Hebrew word for "charity" tzedakah, simply means "justice" and as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.
— Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.
— Johnny Carson
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.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.
— Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.
— B.R. Myers
We cannot be too careful about the words we use
—  we start out using them and they end up using us.
Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.
— NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American
They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.
— Stephen Fry
Well,' said Can o' Beans, a bit hesitantly,' imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings.'Huh?'Quite so. The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.'The manner in which the other were regarding him/her made Can O' Beans feel compelled to continue. 'The word neat, for example, has precise connotations. Neat means tidy, orderly, well-groomed. It's a valuable tool for describing the appearance of a room, a hairdo, or a manuscript. When it's generically and inappropriately applied, though, as it is in the slang aspect, it only obscures the true nature of the thing or feeling that it's supposed to be representing. It's turned into a sponge word. You can wring meanings out of it by the bucketful--and never know which one is right. When a person says a movie is 'neat,' does he mean that it's funny or tragic or thrilling or romantic, does he mean that the cinematography is beautiful, the acting heartfelt, the script intelligent, the direction deft, or the leading lady has cleavage to die for? Slang possesses an economy, an immediacy that's attractive, all right, but it devalues experience by standardizing and fuzzing it. It hangs between humanity and the real world like a . . . a veil. Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy. I'd hate to ever see that kind of craziness rub off onto objects.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
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.
— Jacques Derrida
Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.
— Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.
— Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.
— Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs
Every word is a prejudice.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
No new world without a new language.
— Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories
There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!
— Barbara Holland