Quotes about Language

We float in language like icebergs — four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.

We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Threequarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

We should have an easier name to pronounce.

Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.

Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later.

Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.

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.

Two of the chief defenders of the faith in the Old Testament and in the New - Moses and Paul - were both well-versed in the language, the thinking, and the philosophy of their cultures.

So soon as I talk I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.