Quotes about language

Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.

You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.

A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other.

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.

for I had reached a point in my life when I came to view words differently. A closer look at language could reveal the secret of life.

Gatuĩria was at least aware that the slavery of language is the slavery of the mind and nothing to be proud of."

I once read that the Devil studied Basque for seven years and only learned two words.

"Maybe one of the worst things that we can do is to diminish the possibility of the universe in our insistence on our description of it."

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next. Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.

"How many men, do you suppose, realise the limitations of using words to convey our meanings? They may find that there are inconvenient misunderstandings, and blame language, but how many admit that the words are just a substitute for the thing they really lack—mental communication? Precious few. My point is that they do not realise the lack of direct mental communication, because they've never had it. They look on spoken or written language as a natural method of expression, whereas it is really a mechanical process [...]"

'There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.'