Quotes about language

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Born in Provence, he [Bishop Myriel] easily became familiar with all the [Occitan] dialects of the South. [...] People loved this, and it had helped him greatly to get close to all kinds of temperaments. Whether he was in a cottage or up in a mountain, he would feel at home. He knew how to speak of the highest things using the lowliest vulgar expressions. By speaking every tongue, he entered every soul.

He who does not speak foreign languages knows nothing about his own.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all.

"I don't like Latin," said Miss Frettlby, shaking her pretty head. "I agree with Heine's remark, that if the Romans had had to learn it they would not have found time to conquer the world."

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.

In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful.

Sometimes when we make these distinctions, we’re really creating them more than describing anything that’s already there.

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or , or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.