Quotations - Language Quotations

Language Quotations

Ø      It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase "As pretty as an airport" appear. - Douglas Adams

Ø      Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. - Joseph Addison

Ø      Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery. - Mark Amidon

Ø      By words the mind is winged. - Aristophanes

Ø      As a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one tongue. - Roger Ascham

Ø      He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. - Francis Bacon

Ø      Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues. - Ambrose Bierce

Ø      There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the Earth. - Elias Canetti

Ø      England and America are two countries divided by a common language. - George Bernard Shaw

Ø      Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place. - John French

Ø      Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Ø      Every language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Ø      When you go to a country, you must learn how to say two things: how to ask for food, and to tell a woman that you love her. Of these the second is more important, for if you tell a woman you love her she will certainly feed you. - Louis L'Amour

Ø      Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets. - Eddy Peters

Ø      Any time you think some other language is strange, remember that yours is just as strange, you're just used to it. - Linguistic Mystic

Ø      Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. - Abraham Lincoln

Ø      Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing. - Giles Lytton Strachey

Ø      Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations. - Edward Sapir

Ø      Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Ø      Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain

Ø      They spell it Vinci and pronounce it 'Vinchy': foreigners always spell better than they pronounce. - Mark Twain

Ø      If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. - Nelson Mandela

Ø      He that has many languages to expreese his thoughts, but no thoughts worth expressing, is like one that can write all hands, but never the better sense, or can cast up any sum of money, but has none. - Samuel Bulter (1612-1680)

Ø      Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language. - Wilhelm von Humboldt

Ø      Language is the spiritual exhalation of the nation. - Wilhelm von Humboldt

Ø      Has a nation anything more precious than the language of its fathers? - Johann Herder

Ø      a sensible conclusion is that languages are 'difficult' in inverse proportion to the strength of motivation for learning them. - Reg Hindley

Ø      The loss of languages is tragic precisely because they are not interchangeable, precisely because they represent the distillation of the thoughts and communication of people over their entire history. - Marianne Mithun

Ø      We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course if many hundred years has contributed a stone. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ø      No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby, - so helpless and so ridiculous. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ø      Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generation. - Edward Sapir

Ø      I am sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations. - Dr Johnson

Ø      The world is a mosaic of visions. With each language that disappears, a piece of that mosaic is lost. - François Grosjean

Ø      Language embodies the intellectual wealth of the people who use it. - Kenneth Hale

Ø      Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides. - Rita Mae Brown

Ø      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

Ø      Language is wine upon the lips. - Virginia Woolf

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