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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.”

WayIdeasCharacterUseRealityLanguageLosesDependsMessagesTasksStriveCommunicateObjectivesDescriptionScopeDiscernmentOur WordsSuspended
Author:Niels Bohr
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“Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different 'values', to use the language of painters?”

DifferentUseValuesLanguageForceEssentialsDegreesShadowAssumingAppearancePainterSufficientOppositionShadeRationalityLightersTrue And FalseDifferent Values
Book:Basic Writings of Nietzsche
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“You live in a society that is shaped in every possible way by the Bible. The language you use, the laws you obey (and disobey), the founding principles of your nation, the disputes about abortion, homosexuality, adultery - these and so much else in your world are rooted in the Bible. You don't have to read it for its truth value. You should read it to understand how your world got the way it is, the way you would read the constitution or Shakespeare.”

WorldWayShouldUseLawValuesLanguageNationsPrinciplesConstitutionAbortionRootedHomosexualityFoundingDisputesAdultery
Author:David Plotz
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“Like language, a code of manners can be used with more or less skill, for laudable or for evil purposes, to express a great variety of ideas and emotions. In itself, it carries no moral value, but ignorance in use of this tool is not a sign of virtue.”

IdeasUseUsedPurposeValuesEvilLanguageEmotionMoralVirtueIgnoranceSkillsToolsVarietyMannersCodeCarrieMoral Values
Book:Common courtesy: in which Miss Manners solves the problem that baffled Mr. Jefferson
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“Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.”

KnowsWayNeedsFirstsWellsUseRememberUsedLyingLanguageHalfDutyMoralityIntentionRoundsConfusionGrammarMisuseHalf TruthMisusedBest Intentions
Book:Steering the craft: exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew
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“Anyone who has undergone home repair lately knows that your everyday artisan uses language so loosely and makes false promises so glibly as to make your politicians, even the presidential candidate, seem like a model of accuracy and rectitude. 'Be there Wednesday at nine,' the workman will tell you. It is a lie. He is humoring you. He says it to silence you, the way you tell a child you will take it to Disneyland if it will stop crying.”

IfsKnowsWayChildrenUseHomeSeemsLyingLanguageSilenceCryPoliticianPromiseModelsEverydayNinePresidentialCandidatesAccuracyDisneylandWednesdayPresidential CandidateWorkmenArtisansRectitudeFalse Promises
Author:Mary McGrory
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“I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.”

PeopleThinkingWayUseSeemsLanguageBecomingHappeningsSizeEnormousPostsTerritoryRelaxedFlexibilityEnglish LanguageFrontiersBecoming MoreCarving
Author:Salman Rushdie
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“New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding - great uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only seems flat, the sun only seems to circle the earth, matter only seems solid.”

GivingWritingMatterUseSeemsAgeEarthFoundLanguageUnderstandingSunFireRevolutionPerspectiveBirthCirclesDramaticWheelsFlatsHumankindHistoricNew Perspective
Book:The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s
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“All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female - all result in different ways of talking.”

WayDifferentCountryUseLanguageGrowsReligiousResultsTalkingClassGrowing UpGrowingCommunicationFemaleCrossesMalesBackgroundsDifferent WaysJust BeingWay Of Talking
Book:That's not what I meant!: how conversational style makes or breaks your relations with others
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“I try to teach my students style, but always as a part of life, not as ornament. Style has to come out of communicating coherent thought, not in sticking little flowers on speeches. Style and substance and a sense of life are the things literature is composed of. One must use one's own personality in relationship to life and language, of course, and everyone has such a relationship. Some people find it, some don't find it, but it's there.”

PeopleTryingLittlesUseCoursesLiteratureLanguageTeachStyleStudentsFlowerPersonalitySpeechCommunicateSubstanceParts Of LifeOrnaments
Author:Marguerite Young
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“Some feminist critics debate whether we take our meaning and sense of self from language and in that process become phallocentric ourselves, or if there is a use of language that is, or can be, feminine. Some, like myself, think that language is itself neither male nor female; it is creatively expansive enough to be of use to those who have the wit and art to wrest from it their own significance. Even the dread patriarchs have not found a way to 'own' language any more than they have found a way to 'own' earth (though many seem to believe that both are possible).”

IfsThinkingWayBelieveArtSelfEnoughUseSeemsEarthFoundLanguageProcessFemaleCriticsMalesFeministWitDebateSignificanceFeminineDreadSense Of SelfUse Of Language
Book:Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-busting Border-crossing Loose Canons
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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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“In I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman demonstrates once again her love for the specific language that rises from the juncture of self and the natural world, and her skillful use of that language. Whether she turns her attention to the act of eating an apricot 'the color of shame and dawn,' or to 'the omnipotence of light,' or to grief when 'All the greens of summer have blown apart,' her linking of unique images, her energetic wit and whimsy, her compassionate investment in life, always bring new pleasures and perceptions to the reader.”

WorldSelfUseLightTurnsLanguageNaturalPleasureGriefAttentionColorReaderPerceptionEatingSummerUniquePraiseShameInvestmentWitDawnCompassionateNatural WorldEnergeticSkillfulDestroyersOmnipotenceWhimsyJunctureApricots
Author:Pattiann Rogers
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“There are some words I find impossibly difficult ... 'Love,' 'feeling' and especially 'happiness' are at the head of the list. This is not because I haven't experienced any of them but because whenever I think about using the words I don't really know what anyone means by them. I'd find it easier to sit down and write a book about each (coming, obviously, to no conclusion) than to use them casually in speech or writing.”

ThinkingKnowsWritingMeanBookUseFeelingsLanguageDifficultHavensEasierSpeechDown AndListsConclusionLove Feeling
Author:Jenny Diski
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“I try to write each piece in the language of the piece, so that I'm not using the same language from piece to piece. I may be using ten or twenty languages. That multiplicity of language and the use of words is African in tradition. And black writers have definitely taken that up and taken it in. It's like speaking in tongues. It may sound like gibberish to somebody, but you know it's a tongue of some kind. Black people have this. We have the ability as a race to speak in tongues, to dream in tongues, to love in tongues.”

PeopleKnowsWritingTryingKindMayUseDreamSpeakLanguageSoundBlackAbilityRaceTakenPiecesTenTraditionTwentiesTongueBlack PeopleMultiplicitySpeaking In Tongues
Author:Alexis De Veaux
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“The primary purpose of the Legislature in establishing "Arbor Day," was to develop and stimulate in the children of the Commonwealth a love and reverence for Nature as revealed in trees and shrubs and flowers. In the language of the statute, "to encourage the planting, protection and preservation of trees and shrubs" was believed to be the most effectual way in which to lead our children to love Nature and reverence Nature's God, and to see the uses to which these natural objects may be put in making our school grounds more healthful and at-tractive.”

WayMayChildrenUseSchoolPurposeLanguageNaturalTreeObjectsFlowerOur ChildrenProtectionPrimariesReverencePreservationLegislatureCommonwealthStatutesNature LoveShrubsArbor DayArbors
Author:Andrew S. Draper
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“Language both reflects and shapes society. Culture shapes language and then language shapes culture. Little wonder that the words we use to talk to each other, and about each other, are the most important words in our language: they tell us who I am, they tell us who you are, they tell us who 'they' are.”

LittlesImportantUseCultureLanguageWonderShapesWho You AreWho I AmImportant Words
Book:Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language
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