Language Quotes - Page 87

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.

I grew up speaking both languages, and for me that's really important.

[Phil Wood] was a great artist, and he knew things. He could be mildly conversant in several languages.

Music crosses cultures and language barriers and it makes people feel good.

He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.

Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.

I don't use coarse language very often. I have a larger vocabulary than that.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.

Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.

I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.

And don't confound the language of the nation with long-tail'd words in osity and ation.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows.

Dutch is not so much a language as an ailment of the throat.

Language buries, but does not resurrect.

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

A thing well said will be wit in all languages.

I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language.

Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?