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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.”

MenDoeFallGamesLanguageNationsSocialFitDetermineBelongingArrangementsEnteringSocial LifeImpervious
Author:Alain Finkielkraut
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“The seriousness or otherwise of the subject matter is often irrelevent to the question of whether a book is any good. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote a great and beautiful novel which mainly involved shallow people going to parties in a rich guy's house. By contrast, all sorts of terrible books are published every month about men slaughtering people for no reason - a serious matter which, in itself, does not make the author worthy of serious consideration.”

PeopleMenDoeBookMatterReasonBeautifulGuyHouseLanguagePartyNovelRichSubjectsSeriousMonthsInvolvedTerribleWorthyConsiderationNo ReasonContrastShallowSeriousnessSubject MatterScott Fitzgerald
Author:Declan Lynch
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“Far away on the path we saw Sir Henry looking back, his face white in the moonlight, his hands raised in horror, glaring helplessly at the frightful thing which was hunting him down. But that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him. Never have I seen a man run as Holmes ran that night.”

IfsMenBookHandsRunningPainFacesNightLanguageWhitePathSawsCryWindHorrorRaisedWoundsVulnerableMortalsRanHuntingFar AwayLooking BackMoonlightHolmesHounds
Book:Sherlock Holmes Complete Collection With illustrated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - 4 Novels, 56 Short Stories and 120+ illustrations
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“We ought always to conform to the manners of the greater number, and so behave as not to draw attention to ourselves. Excess either way shocks, and every man truly wise ought to attend to this in his dress as well as language, never to be affected in anything and follow without being in too great haste the changes of fashion.”

MenWayWellsLanguageNumbersAttentionGreaterWiseFashionHe ManOughtDrawsDressesEvery ManMannersBehaveShockAffectedExcessConformHaste
Author:Moliere
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“Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body; which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray.”

MenTwoSoulReasonBodyPassionLanguageVoiceToo MuchConscienceInstinctGuidesDeceivingAstonishing
Author:Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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“No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.”

MenLanguageMastersCapable
Book:The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
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“A great character, founded on the living rock of principle is, in fact, not a solitary phenomenon, to be at once perceived, limited, and described. It is a dispensation of Providence, designed to have not merely an immediate, but a continuous, progressive, and never-ending agency. It survives the man who possessed it; survives his age,--and perhaps, his country, his language.”

MenCountryCharacterFactsAgeLanguagePrinciplesRocksHe ManAgencyPhenomenonProgressivePossessedSolitaryProvidenceNever EndingGreat Character
Book:Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions
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“He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.”

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Author:Washington Irving
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“sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.”

MenStillsFeelingsProblemUsedLanguageCatRelationFoundationInstinctLipsSentencesArchitectureReadinessClimax
Book:The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews
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“In many patriarchies, language, as well as cultural tradition, reserve the human condition for the male. With the Indo-European languages this is a nearly inescapable habit of mind, for despite all the customary pretense that 'man' and 'humanity' are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured that in practice, general application favors the male far more often than the female as referent, or even sole referent, for such designations.”

MenMindHumansWellsFactsHumanityLanguageSexTermPracticeConditionsHabitFemaleTraditionMalesFavorsDespiteApplicationHuman ConditionSoleReservesPatriarchyPretenseHabits Of MindDesignation
Author:Kate Millett
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“My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation.”

MenMayDifferentSelfSpeakLanguageSocialMoralShareResearchMen And WomenAssumingVocabularySystematicPropensityDifferent LanguagesOverlappingSocial Relationships
Book:In a Different Voice
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“when Christian theology becomes traditionalism and men fail to hold and use it as they do a living language, it becomes an obstacle, not a help to religious conviction. To the greatest of the early Fathers and the great scholastics theology was a language which, like all language, had a grammar and a vocabulary from the past, but which they used to express all the knowledge and experience of their own time as well.”

MenWellsHelpingUseChristianPastUsedReligionFatherLanguageReligiousFailingConvictionObstaclesTheologyVocabularyGrammarKnowledge And ExperienceChristian TheologyScholastics
Author:Lily Dougall
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“Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children.”

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Author:Marie Colvin
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“the way in which a faith community shapes language about God implicity represents what it takes to be the highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty. ... While officially it is rightly and consistently said that God is spirit and so beyond identification with either male or female sex, yet the daily language of preaching, worship, catechesis, and instruction conveys a different message: God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman, or at least more fittingly addressed as male than as female.”

MenWaySaidDifferentGodSpiritLanguageSexCommunityShapesWorshipMessagesHighestFemaleMalesInstructionConsistentlyPreachingIdentificationFaith Community
Author:Elizabeth A. Johnson
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“Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.”

ThinkingMenWayFeelsMightRunningFormLanguageAnswersSawsExampleLimitsEthicsBoundsNonsenseUrgesParadoxNeverthelessAstonishment
Author:Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.”

MenWorldWayHumansDoeSelfLanguageSleepAchieveSubjectsFieldsDegreesMathematicsPatternsArticlesEndeavourUtteranceNegationInceptionHuman Language
Book:His Master's Voice
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“In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.”

MenHumansKindMeanDifferentFactsAmericaThreeLanguageVoiceInterestingRaceAttitudeTalkingPiecesStupidMarkEnglandBoundsIncludingDespiteBoatMagazinesDamnHuman RaceDistinctionTeensContinentsVolumeImpressedEnglish LanguageLaid BackLaconic
Author:Terry Pratchett
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“Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that 'other' who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals.”

MenHumansDifferentEvilSpeakLanguageReligiousColorHe ManSkinsStupidityTraditionalMysteriousManifestationDestructiveRitualTribesMistrustRiteAnti SemitismDifferent LanguagesDifferent ColorsHuman Stupidity
Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
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“We are like dogs, cats, cows, rats ... What separates us from them and from the remaining matches against mammals is negligible. To have the same diseases. Rats spread plague like us, but we are just as contagious as them. And the dogs get diabetes, like we do, and get cancer, like us. And age, like us. And die, like us. Why then the biblical claim that man is the king of creation? Perhaps because only man has developed spoken language, the words, wherein lies its prodigious ability to lie.”

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Author:Fernando Vallejo
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“We are a free people; and now you have planted in our country the title deeds of our future slavery. You are neither god nor demon; who are you, then, to make slaves? Orou! You understand the language of these men, tell us all, as you have told me, what they have written on this sheet of metal: This country is ours. This country yours? And why? Because you have walked thereon? If a Tahitian landed one day on your shores, and scratched on one of your rocks or on the bark of your trees: This country belongs to the people of Tahiti - what would you think?”

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Author:Denis Diderot
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“Crude men who feel themselves insulted tend to assess the degree of insult as high as possible, and talk about the offense in greatly exaggerated language, only so they can revel to their heart's content in the aroused feelings of hatred and revenge.”

MenFeelsHeartFeelingsLanguageDegreesHatredRevengeInsultOffenseCrudeExaggeratedInsultedHatred And Revenge
Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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