language

Sociology is a new science concerning itself not with esoteric matters outside the comprehension of the layman, as the older sciences do, but with the ordinary affairs of ordinary people. This seems to engender in those who write about it a feeling that the lack of anyabstruseness in their subject matter demands a compensatoryabstruseness in their language. 365

—Gowers, Sir Ernest Arthur

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

—Adams, Henry Brooks

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo'd by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety.

—Gilbert, Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck)

: Bad language or abuse, I never, never use, Whatever the emergency; Though 'Bother it' I may Occasionally say, I never use a big, big Dö : What, never? : No, never! : What never? : Well, hardly ever! : Hardly ever swears a big, big Dö Then give three cheers, and one cheer more, For the well-bred Captain of the Pinafore!

—Gilbert, Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck)

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

The point is the seeingöthe grace beyond recognition, the ways of the bird rising, unnamed, unknown, beyond the range of language, beyond its noun. Eyes open on growing, flying, happening, and go on opening. Manifold, the world dawns on unrecognizing, realizing eyes. Amazement is the thing. Not love, but the astonishment of loving.

—Reid, Alastair

I think you always feel braver in another language.

—Brookner, Anita

Custom is the most certain mistress of language, as the public stamp makes the current money.

—Jonson, Ben

Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.

—Safire,William

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the L did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the L scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

—Bible (Old Testament)

The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama†ridicule and reproach†pleading and persuasion.

—Safire,William

Oh! it is onlya novel!†only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineationof itsvarieties,theliveliesteffusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

—Austen,Jane

England and America are two countries divided by a common language.

—Shaw, George Bernard

Among the forests Of metal the one human Sound was the lament of The poets for deciduous language.

—Thomas, R(onald) S(tuart)

It is hard for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

—Hardy,Thomas

Yes, they say, go and write whatever story you want, but don't use whatever language is necessary† By implication those in authority ask the writer to censor and suppressheror his ownwork.Theydemand it.If you don't comply then your work isn't produced.

—Kelman,James

The four most dramatic words in the English language: 'Act One, Scene One.'

—Hart, Moss

Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

—Rich, Adrienne Cecile

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idiomsölike cuttlefish squirting out ink.

—Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

—Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

—Walcott, Derek Alton

During my seven years in office,I was in love with seventeen million French women† I know this declaration will inspire irony and that English language readers will find it very French.

—Giscard d'Estaing,Vale¤  ry

Everyquotation contributessomething tothestabilityor enlargement of the language.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

—Thoreau, Henry David

   'next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims'and so forth oh say can you see by the dawn's early my country 'tis of centuries come and go and are no more what of it we should worry in every language even deafanddumb they sons acclaim you glorious name by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

—cummings, e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings

Experience is always larger than language.

—Rich, Adrienne Cecile

Finality is not the language of politics.

—Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

Ballard admitted he was no hand at giving descriptions; the man was apparentlya gentleman and the womanö well, not exactlya lady, although shehad a very fine flow of language.

—Ridge,W(illiam) Pett

La langue fran c° aise n'est point fixe¤  e et ne se fixera point. French is not a static language and will never become static.

—Hugo,Victor Marie

The vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. 786 The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

To watch him fumbling with our rich and delicate English language is like seeing a Se'  vres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

—Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn

A gifted glassblower of language.

—Hersey,John Richard

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

—Pound, Ezra Loomis

Entitlement spendingöthe politics of greed wrapped in the language of love.

—Armey, Dick (Richard Keith)

I was born†with ready-made parents and a sister and brother who had already begun their store of experience, inaccessible to me except through their language and the record, always slightly different, of our mother and father, and as each member of the family wasborn, each,ina sensewithmemories onloan, began to supply the individual furnishings of each Was-land, each Is-land, and the hopes and dreams of the Future.

—Frame,Janet Paterson also known as Jean PatersonFrame

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

—Hutchens,John Kennedy

'For God, for Country and for Yale', the outstanding single anti-climax in the English language.

—Thurber,James Grover

The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

—Muir, Edwin

Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.

—Behan, Brendan Francis

Language and knowledge are indissolubly connected; theyare interdependent.Good work in language presupposes and depends on a real knowledge of things.

—Sullivan, Anne

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

—Appleton, Sir Edward Victor

   They used language concentrating emotion, detail and image until theyarrived at a form of dew-like steel.

—Brautigan, Richard

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

—Brautigan, Richard

Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences. 828

—Sullivan, Anne

Ma thubhairt ar cainnt gu bheil a'chiall co-ionann ris a'ghaol chan fhior dhi. If our language has said that reason is identical with love, it is not speaking the truth.

—MacLean, Sorley Gaelic name Somhairle MacGill-Eain

My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that.

—Kelman,James

   Off our language he was the lodesterre.

—Lydgate,John

La langue est une raison humaine qui a ses raisons, et que l'homme ne conna|"t pas. Language is a form of human reason, and has its reasons which are unknown to man. See Pascal 641:23.

—Le¤  vi-Strauss, Claude

Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.

—Barthes, Roland

Iamnot yet so lost inlexicographyastoforgetthat words arethe daughters of earth, and thatthings arethesons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but thesigns of ideas: Iwish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

—Carlyle,Thomas

Syntax and vocabularyare overwhelming constraintsötherulesthat runus.Language isusing us to talköwe think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

—Mathews, Harry Burchell

Despite what even manyartists appear to believe, art is not and should not be merelya skill. It should actually be completelyand utterly the language of our feelings, our frame of mind; indeed, even of our devotion and our prayers.

—Friedrich, Caspar David

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

—Gray,Thomas

Unlearn'd, he knew no schoolman's subtle art, No language, but the language of the heart.

—Pope, Alexander

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu. Bestow a purer sense on the language of the horde.

—Mallarme¤  , Ste¤  phane

So this is what our lives have been given to find, A language that can serve our purposes, A marvellous lucidity, a quality of fieryaery light, Flowing like clear water, flying like a bird Burning like a sunlit landscape.

—Grieve

L'expe¤  rience†d'une femme e¤  crivain est comple'  tement schizophre¤  nique. Il faut toujours faire coupure entre les deux: d'une part, employer un langage qui n'est pas le no" t re†et la lutte qu'on me'  ne sur un autre plan, qui tend 'a casser tout  c° a, a'   essayer de faire a'   travers et dans le langage autre chose. The experience†of the woman writer is completely schizophrenic.One is always torn between two approaches: on the one hand, to use a language that is not ours†and on the other, the battle one fights to break all this up, in order to do something else through and in language.

—Wittig, Monique

   Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

The thing that makes poetry different from all of the otherarts†[is] you're using language, which iswhat you use for everything elseötelling lies and selling socks, advertising, and conducting law. Whereas we don't write little concerts or paint little pictures.

—Merwin,W(illiam) S(tanley)

Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.

—Sacks,Jonathan

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.

—Gibbon, Edward

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

—Morley, Christopher Darlington

On dit que la vie et la mort sont au pouvoir de la langue. It is said that life and death are under the power of language.

—Cixous, He¤  le'  ne

Latin. Langage naturel de l'homme. Ga"  te l'e¤  criture. Est seulement utile pour comprendre les inscriptions des fontaines publiques. Il faut se me¤  fier des citations en Latin; elles cachent toujours quelque chose de leste. Latin. Man's natural language. Spoils your style.Useful only for reading the inscriptions on public fountains. Beware of quotations in Latin: theyalways conceal something improper.

—Flaubert, Gustave

[Winston Churchill] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

—Kennedy,John F(itzgerald)

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.

—Murrow, Edward (Edgar) R(oscoe)

There is more learning in their [Chinese] languagethan in anyother, fromthe immensenumberof their characters. It is only more difficult from its rudeness, as there is more labour in hewing down a tree with a stone than with an axe.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

Summer afternoonösummer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

—James, Henry

Music is the universal language of mankind.

—Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Il faut renouveler le langage. We must re-invent language.

—Irigaray, Luce

We had intended you to be The next Prime Minister but three: The stocks were sold; the Press was squared; The Middle Class was quite prepared. But as it is!† My language fails! Go out and govern New South Wales!

—Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire Pierre

Which I wish to remarkö And my language is plainö That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar, Which the same I would rise to explain.

—Harte, (Francis) Bret

La poe¤  sie est le langage naturel de tous les cultes. Poetry is the natural language of all religions.

—Stae«  l, Germaine Necker, Baronne de

The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handywork.One day telleth another: and one night certifieth another. There is neither speech nor language: but their voices are heard among them. Their sound isgone out into all lands: and their words into the ends of the world.

—Book of Common Prayer

Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At lastöfar offöat last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

—Tennyson

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it soundslike.It isimpossible foran Englishmanto openhis mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

—Shaw, George Bernard

Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it isthe condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift ismore Irishthan Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English.

—Cruise

He replied that I must needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not. (For they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.)

—Swift,Jonathan

Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

—Weinstein

Russia is my home†and for everything that I have in my soul I am obligated to Russia and its people. Andöthis is the main thingöobligated to its language.

—Brodsky, Ioseph

Only where there is language is there world. 685

—Rich, Adrienne Cecile

Poets may boast (as safely-vain) Their work shall with the world remain: Both bound together, live, or die, The verses and the prophecy. But who can hope his lines shou'd long Last, in a daily changing tongue? While they are new, envy prevails, And as that dies, our language fails.

—Waller, Edmund

We write in sand, our language grows, And like our tide ours overflows.

—Waller, Edmund

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from another.

—Thurber,James Grover

For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel; Not many people of a strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not understand. Surely, had I sent thee to them, they would have hearkened unto thee.

—Bible (Old Testament)

Poetry happens because of life.Poetry happens because of language.And poetryhappensbecauseofotherpoets.

—Oliver, Mary

La Poe¤  sie est l'expression, par le langage humain ramene¤  e a'   son rythme essentiel, du sens myste¤  rieux des aspects de l'existence; elle doue ainsi d'authenticite¤ notre se¤  jour et constitue la seule ta"  che spirituelle. Poetry is an expression, through human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysteriousness of existence; it endows our life with authenticity and constitutes our only spiritual task.

—Mallarme¤  , Ste¤  phane

Political language†is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

—Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair

Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds, With nothing else compounded, carried full, Pure rhetoric of a language without words.

—Stevens,Wallace

I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.

—Barthes, Roland

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

—Coupland, Douglas

We have room in this country but for one flag, the Stars and Stripes.We have room for but one loyalty, loyalty to the United States.We have room for but one language, the English language.

—Roosevelt,Theodore

Le charme de la nouveaute¤  , peu a'   peu tombant comme un ve" t ement, laissait voir a'   nu l'e¤  ternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les me"  mes formes et le me"  me langage. The charm of novelty, falling little by little like a robe, revealed the eternal monotony of passion, which has always the same forms and the same language.

—Flaubert, Gustave

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

—Sandburg, Carl

For insight into human affairs I turn to stories and poems rather than to sociology. This is the result of my upbringing and background.Iamnot abletomakeuse of the wisdom of the sociologists because I do not speak their language.

—Dyson, FreemanJ(ohn)

A poem is at once the most primitive and most sophisticateduse of language, but myemphasisis onthe former.

—Kunitz, StanleyJasspon

   I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

I don't object to foreigners speaking a foreign language; I just wish they'd all speak the same foreign language.

—Wilder, Billy (Samuel)

Death stands above me, whispering low I know not what into my ear; Of his strange language all I know Is, there is not a word of fear.

—Landor,Walter Savage

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

—Sexton, Anne ne¤  e Harvey

She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew; And sure in language strange she said, 'I love thee true.'

—Keats,John

A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well linked; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows, And new or old, still hasten to a close.

—Cowper,William

Theyare, after all, a language; they do not so much say things about as, theyare what is said.

—Banks, Iain Menzies

Poetryötriestotell you about a vision intheunvisionary language of farm, city and love.

—Engle, Paul Hamilton

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; The Princess For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

—Tennyson

Des mots sont arrache¤  s vivants a'   la langue de¤  funte. Words are taken alive from a defunct language.

—Cixous, He¤  le'  ne

But all the world understands my language.

—Haydn, FranzJoseph

I have called this stylethe Mandarin style† It isthe style of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.

—Connolly, Cyril Vernon