Language Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Samuel Butler
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| No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. |
| - Henry B. Adams |
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| If you can speak three languages you're trilingual. If you can speak two languages you're bilingual. If you can speak only one language you're an American. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Conversation is the slowest form of human communication. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells." |
| - Unknown Author |
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| A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words. |
| - Samuel Butler |
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| Oaths are but words, and words but wind. |
| - Samuel Butler |
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| The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor. |
| - Samuel Butler |
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| Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne. |
| - Quentin Crisp |
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| "Children, don't speak so coarsely," said Mr. Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters' speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library. |
| - Robertson Davies |
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| There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly. |
| - Annie Dillard |
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| Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| Whenever ideas fail, men invent words. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own. |
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. |
| - Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes |
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| Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. |
| - Aldous Huxley |
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| Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought. |
| - William James |
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| Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. |
| - Samuel Johnson |
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| Language is the dress of thought. |
| - Samuel Johnson |
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| It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water. |
| - Franklin P. Jones |
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| Let's not become so worried about not offending anybody that we lose the ability to distinguish between respect and paranoia. |
| - Larry King |
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| The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction. |
| - D.H. Lawrence |
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| We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves. |
| - John Locke |
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| Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions. |
| - Edward Roscoe Murrow |
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| But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. |
| - George Orwell |
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| What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same. |
| - Antonio Porchia |
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| Learn a new language and get a new soul. |
| - Czech Proverb |
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| Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords. |
| - Robert Louis Stevenson |
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| The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. |
| - Lewis Thomas |
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| In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. |
| - Jane Wagner |
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| It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. |
| - Alfred North Whitehead |
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| Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities. |
| - Alfred North Whitehead |
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| I like the word "indolence." It makes my laziness seem classy. |
| - Bern Williams |
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