Sayings about Languages
Love understands all languages. ~ Romanian Proverbs
The echo knows all languages. ~ Finnish Proverbs
God knows what will happen to women who drink wine, girls that speak old languages, and suns that set too early. ~ Breton Proverb
Speaking French is no proof of intelligence. ~ Creole Proverb (Southern U.S.)
Learn a new language and get a new soul. ~ Czech Proverb
Love has its own language, but marriage falls back on the local dialect. ~ Russian Proverbs
Proverbs are the lamp of speech. ~ Saudi Arabian Proverb
Speech both conceals and reveals the thoughts of men. ~ Latin Proverbs
The eyes have one language everywhere. ~ Romanian Proverbs
As long as a language lives, the people will not perish. ~ Czech Proverbs
Who knows the language is at home everywhere. ~ Dutch Proverbs
As the man is, so is his language. ~ Danish Proverbs
Speech is silver, silence is golden. ~ Traditional Proverb
Better wise language than well combed hair. ~ Icelandic Proverbs
You must answer the devil in his own language. ~ Indian Proverbs
Spanish is the language of lovers; Italian is for the singer, French for diplomats, and German for horses. ~ Spanish Proverbs
You are as many a person as languages you know. ~ Armenian Proverbs
Talking to one another is loving one another. ~ Kenyan Proverbs
To quarrel with a man of good speech is better than to converse with a man who does not speak well. ~ Sanskrit Proverb
Arabic is a language, Persian is a delicacy and Turkish is an art. ~ Iranian Proverb
The public improves the speaker’s speech. ~ Iranian Proverbs
Quotations about Languages
Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand. ~ Aphra Behn
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends. ~ James Fenton
The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle. ~ John Ruskin
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. ~ Benjamin Lee Whorf
Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He’s always been there. I can’t remember starting school and not learning about him. ~ Jamie Campbell Bower
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in, so long as it is in a language I do not understand.~ Edward Appleton
When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it. ~ Billy Sunday
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed. ~ Marcel Proust
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation. ~ Noam Chomsky
The language of truth is simple. ~ Euripides
The individual’s whole experience is built upon the plan of his language. ~ Henri Delacroix
The eyes have one language everywhere. ~ George Herbert
There is nothing in philosophy that could not be said in everyday language. ~ Henri L. Bergson
I wish life was not so short, he thought. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about. ~ J. R.R. Tolkien
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language. ~ Daniel Day-Lewis
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. ~ George Bernard Shaw Quotes
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other. ~ E. M. Cioran
Language … isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place. ~ Jeanette Winterson
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to? ~ Clarence Darrow
High thoughts must have high language. ~ Aristophanes
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it’s reflected in his writings. ~ Alex Cox
The most beautiful words in the English language are ‘not guilty’. ~ Maxim Gorky
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. ~ Robert Benchley
The three most dreaded words in the English language are ‘negative cash flow’. ~ David Tang
Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast. ~ Max Muller
The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib. ~ Robert Burchfield
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language. ~ Gaston Bachelard
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden. ~ Karl Kraus
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man. ~ John Berger
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. ~ Henry James
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language. ~ Oscar Wilde Quotes
We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language. ~ Mal Pancoast
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. ~ Walt Whitman
Poetry is the language of feeling. ~ W. Winter
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
No language is rude that can boast polite writers. ~ Aubrey Beardsley
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man. ~ Stephen Greenblatt
The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms. ~ Claudius Galen
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. ~ Jose Saramago
I think one of the best words in the English language is ‘compassion.’ I think it holds everything. It holds love, it holds care… and if everybody just did something. We all make a difference. ~ Michael Crawford
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the field, but not to describe human character. ~ Henry David Thoreau
When it comes to love, the English language bears no shortage of cliches. ~ Sarah MacLean
We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore. ~ Ellen Gilchrist
Language is originally and essentially nothing but a system of signs or symbols, which denote real occurrences, or their echo in the human soul. ~ Carl Jung
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words. ~ George Eliot Quotes
Language is not only the vehicle of thought; it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking. ~ Sir Humphrey Davy
To have another language is to possess a second soul. ~ Charlemagne
‘No’ is the second shortest word in the English language, but one of the hardest to say. ~ Raymond Arroyo
Language is what stops the heart exploding. ~ Jeanette Winterson
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations. ~ Samuel Johnson
Language is the inventory of human experience. ~ L. W. Lockhart
Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open. ~ J. K. Rowling
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I think the most dangerous word in the English language is ‘should.’ ‘I should have done this.’ Or ‘I should do that.’ ‘Should’ implies responsibility. It connotes demand. Which is just not the case. Life ebbs and flows. ~ Chris Pine
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms. ~ James F. Cooper
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. ~ Martin Heidegger
The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language. ~ John Banville
The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial. ~ Robin Marantz Henig
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier. ~ Louise Bogan
English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. It’s the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning. ~ Richard Lederer
The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. ~ Derek Walcott
Language is the dress of thought. ~ Samuel Johnson Quotes
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human. ~ Karl Marx
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas. ~ Samuel Johnson
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. ~ Thomas Hardy
Language is the archives of history. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. ~ George Steiner
My least favorite phrase in the English language is ‘I don’t care.’ ~ James Caan
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. ~ George Orwell
An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language. ~ Martin Buber
He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own. ~ Goethe Quotes
Language is a virus from outer space. ~ William S. Burroughs
The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language. ~ Erez Lieberman Aiden
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language? ~ Russell Hoban
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people. ~ William Butler Yeats
The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them. ~ Oliver Goldsmith
Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one’s mother’s womb. ~ Italo Calvino
When a language creates — as it does — a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past. ~ Christopher Ricks
The most meaningless term in the English language is ‘I take full responsibility.’ When a politician utters those words it means absolutely nothing. ~ Bernard Goldberg
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help. ~ Ronald Reagan Quotes
‘I am’ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‘I do’ is the longest sentence? ~ George Carlin
Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place. ~ John French
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He’s the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square. ~ Alex Cox
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain. ~ Lily Tomlin
If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don’t speak, it’s because everything’s perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection. ~ Jean Baudrillard
