Language Quotes

“Language is generated by the intellect and generates intellect.”

“Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.”

“I was trying to find a language for the body that is not the language of the desiring machine.”

“Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's.”

“Poetry is a sort of homecoming.”

“The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction.”

“The word 'paradise' comes from a Persian word meaning 'walled garden'.”

“No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”

“The sound of a word is at least as important as its meaning.”

“We cannot understand a thing until we can express it.”

“We must be very careful when we say 'never'.”

“Little attention has been paid to the Grammar of our own Tongue.”

“Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.”

“Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be precise.”

“English is a bottomless pit of vocabulary.”

“Je vais ou je vas mourir, l'un et l'autre se dit ou se disent.”

“The great thing about the English language is that it is so accommodating.”

“We are born into a world of words.”

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.”

“A programming language is a tool that has a profound influence on our thinking habits.”