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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing tastes, interests and capacity of his audience. These no less than the language , the marble, the paint, are part of his aw material.; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius, it is laziness and incompetence.”

UsedArtistCultureCoursesLanguageInterestChristianityAudienceMaterialsGeniusTasteCapacityAccountsPaintIndifferenceLazinessIgnoredStrictMarbleIncompetenceTamedHaughty
Author:C. S. Lewis
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“The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.”

IfsFirstsUseUsedLanguageGrowsInnovationFollowingRecognizingDictionaryUnfamiliarDiscerningNew WordsLexicographer
Book:The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
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“Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.”

WorldLongReasonCareUsedLostSpeakLanguageBornAttitudeSeeingBecomingUniversalIllDon't CareHearingTongueRejectsSuspectsSpeakersPopularityInsultedFuseSpeak EnglishInsufferableEnglish Speaking
Book:There's a Country in My Cellar
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“It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.”

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Author:Toni Morrison
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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.”

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Book:Common courtesy: in which Miss Manners solves the problem that baffled Mr. Jefferson
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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.”

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Book:The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews
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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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“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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“The Bible is forbidding when you start to read it. The language is odd. The stories start and stop herkily-jerkily. The characters behave in inexplicable ways. It takes a little bit of time to get into the rhythm of the book. I found reading the first 15 chapters of Genesis very very difficult. Once I got past there, I loved reading, and found it very easy. When you get used to the Bible, it becomes thrilling to read (like any great book - I just had exactly the same experience with the Odyssey).”

WayFirstsLittlesBookCharacterStoriesPastUsedReadingFoundLanguageEasyBitsDifficultLittle BitRhythmOddBehaveChaptersThrillingGenesisGreat BookInexplicableOdyssey
Author:David Plotz
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“When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”

WayTryingUseHomeUsedAsksGamesNamesLanguageObjectsEssenceOriginalsEverydayOneselfPhilosopherMetaphysicsPropositionsMetaphysicalEveryday Use
Book:Philosophical Investigations
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“My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright.”

WorldWayWholeUsedSpeakLanguageStepsPhilosophicalFollowingWhole WorldClimbsPropositionsLaddersUnderstand MeNonsensical
Book:Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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“One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound's Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It's epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you'd be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French-he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who's not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something.”

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Author:Richard Misrach
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“This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: "God may forgive you, but we never can!" - a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy. That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world.”

IfsWorldShouldMayWholeUsedSpiritLanguageSexCommonForgivingWhole LifeGravesDoctrineSubstanceFallenArroganceVisibleDeclarationBlasphemyOffenceDealings
Author:Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
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“If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.”

PeopleIfsWayNeedsLongSometimesChristianPastUsedSpeakLanguageRealizingChristianityOpinionTakenLong TimeUselessConventional
Author:Wendell Berry
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