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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.”

Has BeensBookBodyHandsPoetryTurnsFallLanguageMemoriesPrayerBuildingPoetDisasterBlockDustLandscapeGravityCollapseCould Have BeenColumnsNotebookJerkBarrelsDebrisBucklesCenter Of Gravity
Book:What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)
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“He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.”

ArtWholeArtistLanguageNaturalObjectsPaintingRepresenting
Book:The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals, and Religion, Selected from the Works of John Ruskin
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“I hate set dissertations,--and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.”

WorldHateLanguageLinesNumbersReaderAll ThingsI HateTallConceptionHypothesisObscurityDissertation
Book:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
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“Conversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixtyou,--the trade drops at once: and this is the reasonwhy travellers have so little [good] conversation with natives,--owing to their [the natives'] suspicionthat there is nothing to be extracted from the conversationworth the trouble of their bad language.”

IfsLittlesLanguageTroubleConversationTravelAccountsTradeForeignersTravellerOwingGood ConversationBad Language
Author:Laurence Sterne
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“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”

ThinkingMindHumansMayLanguageParticularUniversalDeterminedDevicesFacultyYieldHuman MindInteractionComponentsGrammarInnateAcquisitionCharacterizationLanguage Acquisition
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”

LanguageGivenProcessGoalPrinciplesStudyParticularSentencesAnalysisDevicesConstructionInvestigationGrammarLinguisticsSyntax
Book:Syntactic Structures
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“The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.”

WayDoeSaidDifferentFactsLanguageTakenRecordsReaderPhotographyPhotographSentencesMake SenseDifferent WaysVisibleListenersPropositionsSequenceDeprivedOf ContextBefore And After
Book:Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”

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Book:About Looking
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“My books have sold largely in England, have been translated into many languages, and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy; but judged by this standard my name ought to last for a few years.”

YearsHas BeensSaidBookCountryLastsValuesNamesLanguageDoubtHeardOughtStandardsTestsEnglandEndureJudgedAutobiographyTrustworthyForeign Countries
Book:The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 29:
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“Tis a barbarous temper, and a sign of a very ill nature, to take delight in shocking any one: and, on the contrary, it is the mark of an amiable and a beneficent temper, to say all the kind things one can, without flattery or playing the hypocrite,--and what never fails of procuring the love and esteem of every one; which, next to doing good to a deserving object who wants it, is one of the greatest pleasures of this life.”

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Author:Samuel Richardson
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“Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

LittlesDoeAsksHouseSpeakLanguageCitiesStreetsPeriodsTownsAncientVariousChemistrySquaresUniformsMultitudesSuburbsSymbolismMazesCalculusOld And New
Author:Ludwig Wittgenstein
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