If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
View’d freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other – by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere “assonance” rather than that of actual rhyme.
Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.[Wie alles Metaphysische ist die (prästabilierte) Harmonie zwischen Gedanken und Wirklichkeit in der Grammatik der Sprache aufzufinden.]
