c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is botulism.Sausages may taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.
— Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.
— George Steiner
Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of themwas hurt or molested by our band. (...) The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upontheir rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, andwe the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protecttheir property.How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make rightlook like wrong, and wrong like right.
— Black Hawk, Black Hawk: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me – and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use.
— Giuseppe Peano
Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels, and the like. They signal education and learning, but they are not the same thing as education and learning.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
The fact is that very few of us know what words mean; fewer still take the trouble to enquire. We calmly, we carelessly assume that our minds are identical with that of the writer, at least on that point; and then we wonder that there should be misunderstandings!The fact is (again!) that usually we don't really want to know; it is so very much easier to drift down the river of discourse, "lazily, lazily, drowsily, drowsily, In the noonday sun."Why is this so satisfactory? Because although we may not know what a word means, most words have a pleasant or unpleasant connotation, each for himself, either because of the ideas or images thus begotten, of hopes or memories stirred up, or merely for the sound of the word itself.
— Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears
the voice taunted, and threatened: "you are afraid, unhappy, dissatisfied, what if…."but I knew, this was not His language for motivating my heart,so I waited quietly to hear my Father's native tongue, "I love, I am satisfied, I trust, this is the way..." - and I moved.
— Kate Mullane Robertson
Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even so, Nelson Mandela made it a point to learn this language in prison in anticipation that it would help him lead the whole of South Africa.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
Yesterday's abomination is today's rule.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or ‘feeling-thinking’ to define language that speaks the truth. Eduardo Galeano
— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings
If you look at the historical record, you will find that language has always been in decline. Which means, really, and it never has.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language PERFECT, in the language pundit's mind? One has the feeling that the decline-mongers would feel rather sheepish has reading any answer. The 1950s? The Edwardian era? The real answer, however rarely expressed, seems to be "when Island it as a young person.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.
— NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
When I learn the meaning of a word, I know the word; but when I say to myself, 'I know the word,' there comes a reflection of the word back from the mirror of my mind, making a second impression, and after that I am at least not so likely to forget it...“When, then, I think about the impression that the word makes upon me, how it is affecting me with the knowledge of itself, then I am what I should call self-conscious of the word—conscious not only that I know the word, but that I know the phenomena of knowing the word—conscious of what I am as regards my knowing of the word.
— George MacDonald
...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.
— Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.
— Alessandro Volta
He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.
— Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You: Stories
But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything’s handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven’t understood what the director’s on about… The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you’re reading.
— Daniel Pennac
Kaohinani is a Hawaiian word meaning “gatherer of beautiful things.
— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings
The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain after the conquest of that country by the Romans. These Teutons comprised Angles, Saxons, Jutes and several other tribes from the northern part of Germany. They spoke different dialects, but these became blended in the new country, and the composite tongue came to be known as the Anglo-Saxon which has been the main basis for the language as at present constituted and is still the prevailing element.
— Joseph Devlin, How to Speak and Write Correctly
What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.
— Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant
Music is exciting and easy to enjoy, the rhythm and voice.It does not need interpretation. That is why it is called the Universal Language.
— Ellen J. Barrier, The Price We Must Pay for Our Father's Sins
A book, child. A book just for you, in a lost language.
— Celia McMahon, Skye
As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to make the best of it in there and would soon rage and would have to speak this thieves' cant, the only language at his disposal, in order not to be so abandoned.
— Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories
language is almost the most unique creation of humankind which defines itself; the alternative way of communication/comprehension/conception, yet overusing any invention, can cause Alienation.
— Fereidoon Yazdi
Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.
— William Zinsser
Nick demonstrated twenty-three ways of communicating without words by fanning himself with a napkin. "This one means oops, your fly is open, sir, and if you lower the fan a little and look at someone over the top of it, it means wow, I'd like to marry you. But if you do it the other way around, it means ha ha, we are now at war with Spain.
— Kerstin Gier, Saphirblau
Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?
— Ray Gwyn Smith, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
We're on the border of this world, speaking a common language. That's all.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
. . . to my surprise I began to know what The Language was about, not just the part we were singing now but the whole poem. It began with the praise and joy in all creation, copying the voice of the wind and the sea. It described sun and moon, stars and clouds, birth and death, winter and spring, the essence of fish, bird, animal, and man. It spoke in what seemed to be the language of each creature. . . . It spoke of well, spring, and stream, of the seed that comes from the loins of a male creature and of the embryo that grows in the womb of the female. It pictured the dry seed deep in the dark earth, feeling the rain and the warmth seeping down to it. It sang of the green shoot and of the tawny heads of harvest grain standing out in the field under the great moon. It described the chrysalis that turns into a golden butterfly, the eggs that break to let out the fluffy bird life within, the birth pangs of woman and of beast. It went on to speak of the dark ferocity of the creatures that pounce upon their prey and plunge their teeth into it--it spoke in the muffled voice of bear and wolf--it sang the song of the great hawks and eagles and owls until their wild faces seemed to be staring into mine, and I knew myself as wild as they. It sang the minor chords of pain and sickness, of injury and old age; for a few moments I felt I was an old woman with age heavy upon me.
— Monica Furlong, Wise Child
In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
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 negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are 
— Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House
The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.
— Sara Sheridan
Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs.
— Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction
A Blessing on the PoetsPatient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker,Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover,Sharer and saver, muser and acher,You who are open to hide or uncover,Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker;May language’s language, the silence that liesUnder each word, move you over and over,Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.
— Annie Finch, Spells: New and Selected Poems
A rumor is usually a lie that the media can legally profit from.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down...
— George Saunders, Fox 8: A Story
The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.
— Peter Levi, The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin
A civil tongue speaks the language of masters. An uncivil tongue reveals character flaws of its master.
— John R. Dallas Jr., We Need to Have a Word: Words of Wisdom, Courage and Patience for Work, Home and Everywhere
Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)
— Susan Sontag
He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
— Jeanette Winterson
He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat
— Sara Sheridan, London Calling
I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
The Biblical language was so deeply embedded in the great man's mind that it became his normal way of speaking.
— Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership
...he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love.
— The Alchemist
Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.
— Louise Erdrich, The Round House
Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.
— Octavio Paz, The Blue Bouquet
Clover['s] eyes are full of language.
— Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters
Musicians do not have to be believed in. We do not have to be trusted. Our Music speaks for itself without the listener having to know anything about us. Music touches people's emotions in a way that nothing else can. When people find a musician they like, they are usually fans for Life. If they like the musician and his Music, they will open up their hearts to whatever that musician has to say. It matters not what country the musician or the fan comes from. Music is a language that all understand. It goes beyond and breaks down barriers. This makes the musician very powerful, and with power comes responsibility.
— Victor L. Wooten, The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Communication is not so much about what you say, as what you don't say.
— Jim George, A Husband After God's Own Heart
Feelings or Emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are in your deepest place.
— Judith Wright
I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.
— Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
Finally he steeled himself to read the final rule again. He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie. It was an integral part of the learning of precise speech. Once, when he had been a Four, he had said, just prior to the midday meal at school, “I’m starving.” Immediately he had been taken aside for a brief private lesson in language precision. He was not starving, it was pointed out. He was hungry. No one in the community was starving, had ever been starving, would ever be starving. To say “starving” was to speak a lie. An unintentioned lie, of course. But the reason for precision of language was to ensure that unintentional lies were never uttered. Did he understand that? they asked him. And he had.
— Lois Lowry, The Giver
One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status.
— James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
It was made clear to me that Music is related to everything, especially nature and language, but in order to speak it naturally, I had to first make myself a part of it.
— Victor L. Wooten, The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music
Never invite someone who is speaking a foreign language in your presence to "Go back to your country." The only time that phrase is every acceptable is if you are British and you are speaking to Madonna.
— Celia Rivenbark, Rude Bitches Make Me Tired: Slightly Profane and Entirely Logical Answers to Modern Etiquette Dilemmas
All language is an aspiration to music.
— Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us
ll our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters" from other tongues and cultures.
— Amos Oz, Jews and Words
When two lovers discover a language of their own.
— Saleem Sharma
Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise but, if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.
— Terry Pratchett
This is the Southland burr, the only distinctive regional accent in the country. It's a soft appealing noise, deriving, I presume, from the Sottish settlers, but resembling no known Scottish accent. It's simply Kiwi English with added r's.
— Joe   Bennett, A Land of Two Halves
Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.
— Spencer Gordon, Cosmo
A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man
— Frederick Douglass
The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.
— Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.
— Joseph Brodsky
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
— Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978
Hey dawg, wassup?" he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment.
— Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River
That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing," Frances informs her niece. "That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.
— Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic
Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.
— Julia Penelope
Learn to say “please” and “thank you” in multiple languages.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.
— Spyridon Marinatos
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 nature operates.
— Melvin Schwartz, Principles of Electrodynamics
Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.
— James Joseph Sylvester
In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
Body language has no translation.
— Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land
No. See, when you throw up you're vomiting, but when you throw down you're starting a fight, as in throwing down the gauntlet.""Ohhhh," he said. "I thought you were speaking literally.""I do beg your pardon. Let's literally throw up, but figuratively throw down.
— Kevin Hearne, Hexed
Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.
— Francis A. Schaeffer
Language is the light of the mind.
— John Stuart Mill
My people? Who are they?I went into the church where the congregationWorshiped my God. Were they my people?I felt no kinship to them as they knelt there.My people! Where are they?I went into the land where I was born,Where men spoke my language.I was a stranger there.“My people,” my soul cried. “Who are my people?”Last night in the rain I met an old manWho spoke a language I do not speak,Which marked him as one who does not know my God.With apologetic smile he offered meThe shelter of his patched umbrella.I met his eyes...And then I knew...
— Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni
The tongue of man is a twisty thing.
— Homer
Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head—a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind—and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time.
— George du Maurier
They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
Music is the language of all. It tames the savage beast and allows us to get over heartbreak. It helps us express what we really want to say and it has the power to lift hearts and awaken our souls….
— James A. Murphy, The Waves of Life Quotes and Daily Meditations
She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English
—  it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.
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, sad loss that would be.
— Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
— E.M. Forster
Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
— William Gibson
Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.
— Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook
Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?
— Cynthia Ozick, Dictation: A Quartet
That one of history’s greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.
— Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.
— Heinrich Heine
Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can describe in any page-filling paragraph that can't be captured better in just a sentence or two? Perhaps even nothing in any sentence which cannot better be refined in a single, spot-on word? Does it not follow, then, that there's likely nothing one can say in any word - in saying anything at all - that, ultimately, isn't better left unsaid? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
— Mort W. Lumsden, Citations: A Brief Anthology
Mr Hawkins said nothing
—  the Hawkins' domestic affairs were arranged upon the principle that Fanny supplied the talk and he the silence.
Photograph speaks every language
—  wisdom speaks every language
...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.
— Friedrich Hebbel
The topics which language limits us to aren’t much worth discussing in the first place.(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
— Mort W. Lumsden, Citations: A Brief Anthology
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
— Samuel Johnson
Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.
— John Lawler
If you use the term 'over-exaggerate,' you know the definition neither of 'exaggerate' nor of 'over.
— Rodney Ulyate
I can ask for cigarettes in every language
— David Bowie
How different things might be if, rather than saying "I think I'm in love," we were saying "I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love." Or if instead of saying "I am in love" we say "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
That’s when I have to ask him. “Can you really talk like that? Being holy and all?”“What? Because I’m a priest?” He finishes the dregs of his coffee. “Sure. God knows what’s important.
— Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
— Angela Carter
Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.
— Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
i lost a whole continent.a whole continent from my memory.unlike all other hyphenated americans my hyphen is made of blood.when africa says hellomy mouth is a heartbreakbecause i have nothing in my tongueto answer her.i don’t know how to say hello to my mother.
— african-american ii nayyirah waheed
Music is the Universal Language that allows all people to communicate with each other.
— Ellen J. Barrier
Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.
— Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978
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 Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
The locust has no kingJust noise and hard languageThey talk me over
— David Eugene Edwards
Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee.
— Ben Jonson
To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.
— S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Action
Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I’d gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were “stressed out”.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
The unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created languages to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions come from ancient comic writers. And the ultimate goal of comics is same as the purpose of humanity – to break free from language.
— Manu Joseph, Serious Men
You are. Before you are whatever you are labeled.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.
— Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Norse Myths
There is a rhythm to our language. they echo the rhythm of our life.
— ninotaziz
When animals do something noble we say they are behaving ‘like humans’. When humans do something disgusting we say they are behaving ‘like animals’. Clumsy use of the English language perpetuates the myth that animals are inferior and disposable beings.
— Phillip Wollen
If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.
— Samuel Johnson, Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language
The language I learned was pretty, full of passivity and silence. I had no proper language for the issues of blood and anger, yet much of what went on when I was a child made me angry. There were no words a nice girl could use to describe anger; her options were to remain silent or to use indiscreet language, the kind that curls in a room like smoke and soon disappears. We girls were taught to speak safely and to bandage our anger with polite, pretty words. We might talk about the anger only in questions and sighs, unable to curse, yell or break windows in the beautiful garden.
— Beth Bagley
[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.
— John Wiswell
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. "I hate this language. It changes too often!
— Rick Riordan, The Titan's Curse
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
— George Steiner, Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature & the Inhuman
A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
— Brian Friel, Translations
HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.
— George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...
— George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.
— Patrick Cockburn
[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.
— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?
— Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
How many Lojbanists does it take to change a brokenlight-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decidewhat to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulbemits broken light.
— Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language
The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.
— Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia
...there are no sweeter words in the English language (or any other) than husband and wife.
— Lanier Ivester
Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.
— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton...
— George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
But doesn't add something to what has come before; but takes something away. At its most daring, it can feel like a Bat Turn, a 180-degree spin int the Batmobile. Make that a But Turn.
— Roy Peter Clark, The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English
Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the white peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.
— Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought
The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands—it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language.
— William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley
its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent
— Mark O'Connell, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
The problem Creationists identify is with the word 'theory', not with the case for evolution
— Lance Parkin, Time, Unincorporated 1: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives: Lance Parkin
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 even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.
— Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned.
— Kim Thúy, Ru
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, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don´t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.
— Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Never mistake legibility for communication.
— David Carson
We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.
— Robert Kelly
...he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody's always talking about. They want it to be easy and it's just not going to be.
— Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
She walks to a tableShe walk to table She is walking to a tableShe walk to table now What difference does it makeWhat difference it make In Nature, no completenessNo sentence really complete thought Language, like woman,Look best when free, undressed.
— Wang Ping
What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German.
— Philip K. Dick, VALIS
I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked - Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).
— Manil Suri, The City of Devi
Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, "discourse communities" are often gated,so it's the good writer's job to offer readers a set of keys.
— Roy Peter Clark
In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry
— Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith
Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The ultimate language of yoga is expressed in doing yoga, a practice that transcends words as we open our lives to living more consciously through the infinite wisdom of the heart.
— Mark Stephens, Teaching Yoga: Essential Foundations and Techniques