1,125 Language Quotes

It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of 'there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties'), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be named.

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification - the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life.

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

One sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.

Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life.

Learn your language well and command it well, and you will have the first component to life.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

The funniest line in English is 'Get it?' When you say that, everyone chortles.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Soun is noght but air ybroken, And every speche that is spoken, Loud or privee, foul or fair, In his substaunce is but air; For as flaumbe is but lighted smoke, Right so soun is air ybroke.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

They spell it 'Vinci' and pronounce it 'Vinchy'. Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.

Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light.

Lyrical poetry is out for the time being, and something that is called rap or hip-hop is in. It is still poetry, and we can't live without it. We need language to tell us who we are, how we feel, what we're capable of- to explain the pains and glory of our existence.

That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with 'in' and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say 'In July' and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me by saying so. That's just stupid... 'In July'; I'd love to know how you emphasize 'In' in 'In July'. Impossible! Meaningless!

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

I didn't know dirty words could be done that artfully. ~ Mike Myers, quoted in 'Peter Cook the funniest' The Age (3 January 2005)

I am so afraid of people's words. They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That's how you kill.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can.

Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves? (Mork & Mindy)

And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.

These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be here, but elsewhere.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: 'What you are doing to me is not just,' you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, 'I have the right...' or 'you have no right to...' They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention. [p.63]

A while ago, I left my apartment building and walked my dog... on the ledge. A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths.

I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings...Boy With Pail... Kitten On Fire.

I wish, when I was born, the first thing I said was 'Quote' so the last thing I said before I died would be 'Unquote.'

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good..

Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals.

Your friend insults the homeless by giving them no credit for having made the decisions that shaped their lives, and demeans them further by declaring them powerless to alter their situations. There're many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they're victims.

'To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.'

I'm showing an interest in your work. I thought you liked me showing an interest in your work. My showing. Save the gerund and screw the whale.

Turgenev: The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

After all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered. There may be mistakes or gaps, but there is something in it of what wood or beech or figure has told me, and it is not a tame or conventional language, that proceeds not from nature itself but from a studied manner or a system.

The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off. [citation needed] Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature? Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?

In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. Every spoken word, whether uttered by a living person or by a cartoon character, has its facial grimace, emphasizing the meaning.

We are alive within mystery, by miracle. 'Life,' wrote Erwin Chargaff, 'is the continual intervention of the inexplicable.' We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. The constructions of language (which is to say the constructions of thought) are formed within experience, not the other way around. Finally we live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory. There is no reason whatever to assume that the languages of science are less limited than other languages.

Philologists, who chase A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words...

Broadly speaking, short words are the best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.

One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided whenever possible.

Him: Come to my quarters tomorrow at three. Sonja: I can't. Him: Please! Sonja: It's immoral. What time? Him: Who is to say what is moral? Sonja: Morality is subjective. Him: Subjectivity is objective. Sonja: Moral notions imply attributes to substances which exist only in relational duality. Him: Not as an essential extension of ontological existence. Sonja: Can we not talk about sex so much?

...the analogy between the noises we make when these noises do not symbolize anything which exists, and the worthless checks we write when our bank balance is zero...

il n'y a pas de hors-texte

'A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself.'

If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not, and cannot be 'identical with themselves', the old dictum that 'everything is identical with itself' becomes in [today's understanding of the universe] a principle invariably false to facts.' (Note: Korzybski used '1933' to specify the current understanding. This editor has subsituted the 'more general' form: [today's understanding...])

Any proposition containing the word 'is' creates a linguistical structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.

The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-tzu's dictum: Those who know do not say;Those who say do not know. When the master entered, they asked him what the words meant. Said the master, 'Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?' All of them indicated that they knew. Then he said, 'put it into words.' All of them were silent.

You have three chromosomes, Bryson. X, Y, and Fuckhead.

It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the-if he-if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not-that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. : Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.

Go back to Supercuts and get your $5 back, jabroni.

And, of course, the funniest food: 'kumquats'. I don't even bring them home. I sit there laughing and they go to waste.

Atheism: a non-prophet organization.

'How divine is utterance!' she said. 'As we to the brutes, poets are to us.'

Actually, I- this may sound a little West Texan to you, but I like it. When I'm talking about- when I'm talking about myself, and when he's talking about myself, all of us are talking about me.

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one.

Libertas et natale solum: Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em.

Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

You may charge me with murder - or want of sense - (we are all of us weak at times): But the slightest approach to a false pretence was never among my crimes! I said it in Hebrew - I said it in Dutch - I said it in German and Greek: But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!

Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print out leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to all of them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can't do this and keep a straight face.

I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses from a female mouth, And sounds as if it should be writ on satin, With syllables which breathe of the sweet South, And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in, That not a single accent seems uncouth, Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural, Which we're obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'.

'You sound like a man with a vision. Care to pass that bong over this way?' (2004)

Canadian currency is also called the loonie. Now how can you take an economic crisis seriously? 'The loonie is down!' 'Oh how sad for you!'