Quotes about Language

May no portent of evil be attached to the words I say.

The course that I have uniformly pursued, ever since I became a missionary, has been rather peculiar. In order to become an acceptable and eloquent preacher in a foreign language, I deliberately abjured my own. When I crossed the river, I burnt my ships.

Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently.

Studying Latin can teach you how to think analytically.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process.

Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.

Languages build up to reflect specializations in a way of life. Each specialization may be recognized by its words, by its assumptions and sentence structures. Look for stoppages. Specializations represent places where life is being stopped, where the movement is dammed up and frozen.

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world's language, that it's different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn't speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn't it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don't hear just with your ears. And I said that's what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.

Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is an agreement and a tradition upon which to build.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are many Aramaic texts from the time of Jesus, so one can get a pretty good idea of what the language of Jesus looked liked.