There’s no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.
Language is the source of misunderstandings.[translation by Richard Howard]Words are the source of misunderstandings.[translation by Katherine Woods]
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.
When everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars.
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.
The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms and not only about the ‘facts’ — the latter being, for instance, the black spots on a photographic plate or the water droplets in a cloud chamber. But we cannot speak about the atoms in ordinary language.
The language of Friendship is not words but meanings.
The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
Tears are the silent language of grief.
Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.
