Language

(282 votes)   Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Oliver Wendell Holmes
1809-1894, American Author, Wit, Poet

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(274 votes)   The language of truth is simple.

Euripides
BC 480-406, Greek Tragic Poet

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(273 votes)   There are two too many TOs in this language.

Todd Riker

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(253 votes)   To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Victor Hugo
1802-1885, French Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

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(249 votes)   Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Benjamin Lee Whorf
1897-1941, American Linguist

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(239 votes)   The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Marcellinus Ammianus
Egyptian Historian, Author

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(216 votes)   Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

James Joyce
1882-1941, Irish Author

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(199 votes)   Language is a virus from outer space.

William S. Burroughs
1914-1997, American Writer

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(184 votes)   The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Friedrich Nietzsche
1844-1900, German Philosopher

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(178 votes)   Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772-1834, British Poet, Critic, Philosopher

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(171 votes)   Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(144 votes)   We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Booker T. Washington
1856-1915, American Black Leader and Educator

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(141 votes)   I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

J. R. Tolkien
1892-1973, British Novelist, Scholar

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(127 votes)   The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

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(122 votes)   We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, British Author, Wit

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