“I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out. ”
― Katherine Dunn
“The misuse of language induces evil in the soul”
― Socrates
“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”
― Italo Calvino
“That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.”
― Sarah Dessen
“Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.”
― Gilles Deleuze
“Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.”
― Jeanette Winterson
“Just remember, when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do.”
― Sidney Sheldon
“Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.”
― Alexandre Dumas
“The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”
― Goethe
“When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.”
― John O'Donohue
“Humor is a universal language.”
― Joel Goodman
“A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.”
― Jeanette Winterson
“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.”
― Confucius
“Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress”
― Paul Karl Feyerabend
“Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.”
― Confucius
“Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.”
― Pádraig Pearse
“Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives”
― Alfred De Musset