Top 100 Language Words Quotes
#1. Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.
Toni Cade Bambara
#2. What are your drawn to?"
...
"Language, Words, No, not teaching. Perhaps one day I'll write something.
Ellen Sussman
#3. I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
William Faulkner
#4. I had to settle for two of the most inadequate words in the English language, words to pale to express what I needed to say. Thank you.
Lilith Saintcrow
#5. You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.
Elie Wiesel
#6. [...] it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them [...]
Jose Saramago
#7. Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.
Octavio Paz
#8. I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
Dennis Lehane
#9. I wasn't saying you were heartbroken." I sound like English is a new language for me, the way I stutter out the words. "I just meant it was hard for me to ... to watch."
He neither confirms nor denies that he might or might not have been even a teeny bit heartbroken.
Susan Ee
#10. I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.
Chelsea Clinton
#11. When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.
Akshay Vasu
#12. The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
Steven Pinker
#13. Painting is ... a richer language than words ... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
Jean Dubuffet
#14. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.
Stan D. Jensen
#15. And it occurred to me, standing there, just breathing with her, quiet settling around us, that those might be the three most beautiful words in the English language. We have time.
Ransom Riggs
#16. Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.
Robert Herrick
#17. My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.
Sandra Cisneros
#18. It was as much a battle of wits and words as it was of mitts and swords.
Dean F. Wilson
#19. You cannot rise about your words. A lot of people use foul, pornographic, filthy, language and you SEE, all of those words paint pictures and they reveal the internal thinking of the person on the inside. YOU cannot RISE (forward, onward upward) above your words.
Zig Ziglar
#20. Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
Anne Sexton
#21. It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.
Eduardo Galeano
#22. If only ... the saddest words in the English language.
Kristan Higgins
#23. Five of the most exciting words in the English language: "What shall I read next?
Jason Erik Lundberg
#24. The words sounded like a mournful incantation.
Dan Simmons
#25. In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#26. Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.
Patrick Rothfuss
#27. To use strong language, she thought, was a sign of bad temper and lack of concern for others. Such people were not clever or bold simply because they used such language; each time they opened their mouths they proclaimed I am a person who is poor in words.
Alexander McCall Smith
#28. The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.
Malidoma Patrice Some
#29. The facts that make the world real
these depend on the unreal in order to be recognised by it.
Ingeborg Bachmann
#30. I am demonstrating to you how tasty I think words are. I'm having sex with words in front of you. I'm playing around with them. I'm getting off. I'm trying to titillate you. There's this magical substance, language, that I'm laying out for you. Then you're going to fondle it.
Wayne Koestenbaum
#31. God gets it. When you reach out to him, he's not looking for fancy words that would impress your English teacher. He sees your heart. A groan, a look, a sigh - he speaks every language. He understands.
Max Lucado
#32. Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.
Mandy Patinkin
#33. I think we use a lot of words and labels when trying to describe people: ones with autism, ones without autism. In general, I think that labeling people is a major issue, and people don't understand the power of language.
Nikki Reed
#34. Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.
Voltaire
#35. Two of the saddest words in the English language are, 'What party?' And L.A. is the 'What party?' capital of the world.
Carrie Fisher
#36. Confidence is not posting endless selfies, or repeatedly protesting how happy or in love we are, it's a subtle yet noticeable sheen that emanates from our being - our eyes, our words, our body language.
Sam Owen
#37. What I want is for people to really grab hold of language and not be nervous about it. 'The Word Spy' is all about diving in and playing with words.
Ursula Dubosarsky
#39. There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.
Patricia A. McKillip
#40. Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.
Juan Pablo Galavis
#42. I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?
Rene Denfeld
#43. Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden
a secret language.
Robert Altman
#44. To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.
Christian Wiman
#45. Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.
Henry Sweet
#46. The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.
Flemming Rose
#48. My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.
Elfriede Jelinek
#49. Of course language manifests a belief only if we use its words with the implied acceptance of their appositeness.
Michael Polanyi
#50. We exchanged many frank words in our respective languages.
Peter Cook
#51. The film [Boy and the World]gave me the possibility to create a new language. Animation is a very rich medium but hasn't fully been exploited by artists. Often artists are trapped by words.
Alex Abreu
#52. You follow words of the toga (language of the cultivated class).
[Lat., Verba togae sequeris.]
Aulus Persius Flaccus
#53. I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.
Matt Groening
#54. From her dubious tone alone, I could see how Karin had no idea how terrifying words spoken quietly could be. How words chosen precisely to wreak maximum damage ticked like a bomb in your head, but exploded in your heart hours later, leaving you scarred and changed.
Justina Chen
#55. So our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
#56. To see the beauty of the silent language that comes deep within a heart,only notice the words in type that stir the truth of imaginations dreams.
Joseph
Joseph Arrigo
#57. I don't swear much; I've taken those words out of my vocabulary, and having kids, you have to have two sets of language!
Keith Urban
#58. All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.
Joseph Devlin
#59. as the descendants of the Normans finally amalgamated with the English natives, the Anglo-Saxon language reasserted itself; but in its poverty it had to borrow hundreds of French words (literary, intellectual, and cultural) before it could become the language of literature.
Richard A. LaFleur
#60. Grammar is what gives sense to language ... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.
David Crystal
#61. English is a beautiful language, a remarkably precise language with a million words to choose from to deliver your exact shade of meaning.
Laura Fraser
#62. In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.
Kim Edwards
#63. The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought
Albert Einstein
#64. At all periods of the [English] language it is difficult to assign a beginning date to most new words and meanings. They tend to slip into the language silently, and are placed in date order only when scholars subsequently get to work.
Robert Burchfield
#65. So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.
Amara Lakhous
#66. We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#67. Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.
Toni Morrison
#68. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
Alan W. Watts
#69. The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperation among nations, can be fortified not by weapons of war but by wheat and cotton, by milk and wool, by meat and timber, and by rice. These are words that translate into every language.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#70. If I can learn to understand this language without words, I can learn to understand the world.
Paulo Coelho
#71. Science Magazine wouldn't in a dream think about publishing a single Chinese term. Chinese words and brands must be suppressed, crushed even, hold back at all costs.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#72. Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
Edmund Morgan
#73. The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.
Octavio Paz
#74. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
#75. Daemon spoke in his language. The lyrical quality of his words made no sense to me.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"There's really no translation for it," he said, "but the closest human words would be, you are beautiful to me.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#76. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.
Virginia Woolf
#77. All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
Roland Barthes
#78. Cure is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?
Lauren DeStefano
#80. I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.
William Luce
#81. I like the sounds of words. Words are very enjoyable. I like words because they are ... seductive. And I like words because they can contain ... fantasies.
James Lusarde
#82. a hymn then
not to birds but to words
which themselves feel
like feather and wing
and light, as if it were
on the delicacy of
such sweet syllables
that flocks take flight.
Kei Miller
#83. Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.
Charles Wright
#84. Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
Theodor Adorno
#85. I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.
Margaret Mahy
#86. The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a war, reduce a lifelong relationship to a collection of memories, or end a life.
Simon S. Tam
#87. Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#88. The four most important words in the English language are, "What do you think?" Listen to your people and learn.
J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr.
#90. Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
Mary Oliver
#91. You see, the language of words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I have pointed out. The language of sighs, the language of silent moments, and most significantly, the language of frowns.
Matt Haig
#92. There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.
Eugene Schwartz
#93. DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.
Peter Ackroyd
#94. You can make initial contact with someone who does not speak your language with signs or smiles, but to communicate you need words. So it is with a nation; to understand it you have to read its books
Geoffrey Dutton
#95. Marrakesh is translated from the words Mur N'Akush in the Berber language meaning "Land of God.
Jake Tour
#96. I love these words that just can't be translated from language to language. They seem dignified, grounded, battling against the imperialism of reality.
Olivier Magny
#97. Words, do not have twins in every language. Sometimes they only have distant cousins, and sometimes they pretend that they are not even related.
Monique Truong
#98. There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists ...
Derrick Jensen
#99. Like a baby learning language, we learn how to communicate with God by listening to His words first.
Timothy Keller
#100. With one gaze into her eyes, all words fell away. And it didn't matter at all. In this place of hearticulation, there was no need for words. This love spoke a language all its own, a grammarless lexicon of longing and union. Who needs syllables when you can hear each other's souls?
Jeff Brown
