Language Quotes

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Those who know nothing of foreign languages,knows nothing of their own.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Marcellinus Ammianus

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Language is the only instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Samuel Johnson

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is fossil poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.

Carl Sandburg

A people without a language of its own, is only half a nation.

Thomas Osborne Davis

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

Jorge Luis Borges

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

Geoffrey Willans

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Roland Barthes

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought

Elizabeth Bowen

Language may die at the hands of the schoolman: it is regenerated by the poets

Emmauel Mounier

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations

Samuel Johnson

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation

Elizabeth Bowen

Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade before the public. Never clothe them in vulgar or shoddy attire.

George Crane

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Friedrich Max Muller

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Jose Saramago

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Roland Barthes

Language is memory and metaphor

Storm Jameson