Quotes about Language

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

She heard it as though it were what language was made for

But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention is given to hell rather than heaven. Dante's Inferno beats out Paradisio every time. Milton's brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete.

for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.

Jesus is a person, not a proposition; however, language is the means the Spirit uses to enable the gospel to become the all-encompassing framework that allows disciples not only to think but also to situate themselves in relation to the truth, goodness, and beauty of what is in Christ.

North Americans think they know how to speak Christian, but what they say is actually a gross distortion. Either people do not know Christian words at all, or they have heard them but do not know what they mean, or they think they know what they mean when in fact they mean something completely different.

In order to make the language of dreams understood, we use many parallels from the psychology of primitive races as well as from historical symbolism. This is because dreams originate in the unconscious, which contains the residual potentialities of function of all preceding epochs of evolution.

They misunderestimated me.

The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.

Language like this, no doubt, seems foolishness and affectation to the world; but the well-instructed Bible reader will see in it the heartfelt experience of all the brightest saints. It is the language of men like Baxter, and Brainerd, and M'Cheyne. It is the same mind that was in the inspired Apostle Paul. Those that have most light and grace are always the humblest men.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.