Quotes About Words And Language

#1. This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If

Kim Addonizio

#2. Reality is a flux, an endless becoming that is beyond words and language - all language is metaphor, useful to us but ultimately detached from reality.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#3. 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

#4. I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.

Chelsea Clinton

#5. When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.

Akshay Vasu

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. It was as much a battle of wits and words as it was of mitts and swords.

Dean F. Wilson

#12. 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

#13. Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.

Anne Sexton

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.

Eugene H. Peterson

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

Walter Lippmann

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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.

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. Make a promise to yourself right now, that you will choose your thoughts and words wisely, that you will no longer use disempowered language about yourself, and nor will you ever negatively define yourself by what has occurred in your past.

Miya Yamanouchi

#53. I knew lots of Irish ladies in my life who would say daft things and then would just say something incredibly truthful in a very simple way with simple language - a few well chosen words that would take an intellectual five minutes to express. I like that.

Steve Coogan

#54. Platitudes are poor substitutes for emotions, this negative space hollowed out and without words. I know the shape of you and it has no name. I know the sound of you and the smell of you and the touch and sight and taste of you. But language departed the same day you did, leaving my mouth empty.

Tania De Rozario

#55. Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

Kenneth Branagh

#56. The world is so big and words are so small!

Marty Rubin

#57. The words are in my own internal language, and mean more than I could ever explain,

Lisa Gerrard

#58. English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.

Yael Naim

#59. People become fascinated with pictures and words, and wind up forgetting the Language of the World

Paulo Coelho

#60. We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?

Ursula K. Le Guin

#61. What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?

Mark Twain

#62. The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.

Heinrich Heine

#63. On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]

Peter O'Donnell

#64. In 2005, the Global Language Monitor - a nonprofit organization that does exactly what its name suggests - issued a tongue-in-cheek list of the year's most politically correct words and phrases. Top

Kevin Dutton

#65. Derek cuddled his daughter against his shoulder and spoke in a mixture of baby words and cockney, a language only she seemed to understand.

Lisa Kleypas

#66. Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

#67. Everything has an older meaning. All words have their secrets. Spells and gods are buried in the thicket of language.

Shannon Phillips

#68. Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.

Irving Howe

#69. Less is always more. The best language is silence. We live in a time of a terrible inflation of words, and it is worse than the inflation of money.

Eduardo Galeano

#70. With our bodies we make statements before we speak, our presentation is a language spoken without words. You - and only you - get to decide what it is you're trying to say.

Hannah Hart

#71. Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.

Guy De Maupassant

#72. There is no language so filthy as Spanish. There are words for all the vile words in English and there are other words and expressions that are used only in countries where blasphemy keeps pace with the austerity of religion.

Ernest Hemingway,

#73. Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow.

Ben Fountain

#74. With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.

Andrei Codrescu

#75. Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language.

Moses Finley

#76. Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.

Leonard Mlodinow

#77. Participating in the filling of others' brains with knowledge and know-how is just an extraordinary gift only very few have. Hence, teaching a language is indeed opening these brains to the world with its similarities and dissimilarities taught in different words.

Messaoud Mohammed

#78. Hear this if you can:
If you want to reach him
You have to go beyond yourself
And when you finally arrive at the land of absence
Be silent
Don't say a thing
Ecstasy, not words, is the language spoken there

Rumi

#79. The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies - all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect

David Levithan

#80. ... since the history of words is a mainspring of our intellectual and emotional character.

Cirilo F. Bautista

#81. A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

Ari Marmell

#82. And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.

Lauren Oliver

#83. The four most powerful words in the English language - please, thanks, sorry and why.

Wendy Alexander

#84. But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.

Elizabeth Gaskell

#85. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Robert Hughes

#86. I am all for the inclusion of foreign cultures, not their omission in our media. Foreign names, brands, and inventions must be allowed to show and to compete in US publications. Today, most foreign words are still banned. And almost 7 billion people whose first language is not English are silenced.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#87. This I have observed: There are no language barriers in the Church. There is a mighty power that transcends the power of messages conveyed by words alone, and this is the power of messages communicated by the Spirit to our hearts.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

#88. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#89. In other words, all the highest aims of language are decisively the work
of God. They are decisively supernatural. And no amount of poetic
effort or expertise in the use of words can bring about the great aims
of life if God withholds his saving power.

John Piper

#90. She'd opened the front cover and fallen inside the wonderful, frightening, magical illustrations. She'd wondered what it must feel like to escape the rigid boundaries of words and speak instead with such a fluid language.

Kate Morton

#91. Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

David Lodge

#92. I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

Aleister Crowley

#93. You've got to find a difierent approach. You've got to create some interest in your language, in the words and pictures you create. If a candidate can't give a 10-minute speech and have reporters reaching for their pens in the first 90 seconds, he probably shouldn't be running.

Roger Ailes

#94. The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

Graham Swift

#95. say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but in the purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was at the bottom of it all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us.

Salman Rushdie

#96. Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!

Morris West

#97. The words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language ... those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

Donald Miller

#98. I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.

Donald E. Westlake

#99. Pictures rule, but words define, explain, express, direct, and hold together our thoughts and what we know.

Don Watson

#100. Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words.

John Wesley Powell