Quotes about Language

Usually we regard as meaningful that which can be expressed, and as meaningless that which cannot be expressed. Yet, the equation of the meaningful and the expressible ignores a vast realm of human experience, and is refuted by our sense of the ineffable which is an awareness of an allusiveness to meaning without the ability to express it.

The self-control of passion, the reshaping of his image of the world, the elimination of the sense of merit, the change of language, the effect of his profession on the structure of his life, all hint at the depth of this crisis.

To employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change.

The act of revelation is a mystery, while the record of revelation is a literary fact, phrased in the language of man.

Demagoguery is the ability to dress minor ideas with major words.

Lincoln characterized Stephen Douglas's argument as a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.

Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved.

The whole language of love had been corrupted by overuse.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words.

The day will come … when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus's language, so that people will be alarmed, and yet overcome by its power—the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God's kingdom is drawing near.

Life is our dictionary.