Language Quotes

"The language of friendship is not words, but meanings." — Henry David Thoreau
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) This famous American author spent two years living in the wilderness at Walden Pond, where he penned some of his most-remembered works. This quote was written in memory of a trip he took with his brother John, who died of tetanus in 1842. The quote continues, "It is an intelligence above language. One imagines endless conversations with his Friend, in which the tongue shall be loosed, and thoughts be spoken without hesitance or end..." Add Category or Author

"What they're likely to do is take away the mild and gradual language from the statement." — Adam Mesurier
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"People are definitely expecting (the Jan. 31 minutes) to show similar language to the previous meeting, which is they are coming toward the end but they are not there yet." — Adam Brown
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"Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal." — William Shakespeare
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"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'" — Ludwig Wittgenstein
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"It can't be that simple. Rarely is constitutional language that open and shut." — A.E. Howard
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"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
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"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone" — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality." — Edgar Allan Poe
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"We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ''revolutionary'' but not transformative." — Adrienne Rich
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"The idea is that being able to speak a second language becomes a magical power. We wanted to make it special as opposed to being embarrassed about it." — Brown Johnson
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"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about." — Benjamin Whorf
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"Sign language is useful to the deaf but vital to the Italians." — Paul Carvel
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"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective." — Kenneth Pike
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"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." — William Butler Yeats
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"Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb." — Italo Calvino
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"And some families from southern Egypt are still fluent in the language." — Aghason Paul
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"Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them." — Adlai Stevenson
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"In Chinatown, there has always been overcrowding and unique cultural and language barriers." — Randy Shaw
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"Language is not a problem," — Alain Perrin
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"It's a tough language. I've been doing Shakespeare for 40 years and I still struggle with it. We simplify the language and we cut out a lot of the hard stuff -- we cut the play from 2 1/2 hours to 40 minutes. But we try to get just the meat of the play. Today is not any finished performance. Today is a work in progress. It's still rehearsal time." — Rodney Clark
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