Quotes about Language

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name.

So where does music come from? No one knows. A platonic theory of music just muddies the water. Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it's true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language.

What seems inconsequential to us by reason of usage is in fact the founding notion of civilization. Language, art, mathematics, everything. Ultimately the world itself and all in it.

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of living things.

Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize.

Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences, It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes; It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.

The language that reveals also obscures.

You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.

Wherever men exist, in all ages and in all parts of the world, they have some form of religion. The idea of God is impressed on every human language. And as language is the product and revelation of human consciousness, if all languages have some name for God, it proves that the idea of God, in some from, belongs to every human being.

That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence."