 |
 | ""I wish life was not so short," he thought. "Languages take such a
time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."" | |
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John Ronald Reuel "J. R. R." Tolkien
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| ""When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean?neither more nor less." "The
question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many
different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be
master?that"s all."" | |
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Lewis Carroll
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| "A little studied, but essential aspect of human natural-language
production is the ability to form concise descriptive expressions.... A
very simple model of sentence production involves two steps: first one has
a thought, and then a sentence is chosen out of an infinite number of
possibilities which expresses the thought. For example, a formal semantic
model can be given in which the same "thought" (an expression in
first-order predicate calculus) is expressed by the following four
sentences: I see the big red thing I see the thing that both big and red
It is the thing which is red and which is big I see What I here and now
see is the thing which is big and not small and that is either round or
not round and which has the property of being red." | |
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George Hart
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| "Every quotation contributes something to the stability or
enlargement of the language." | |
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Dr. Samuel Johnson
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| "Fools laugh at the Latin language. ? Rident stolidi verba
Latina." | |
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Publius Ovidius Naso Ovid
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| "Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose
without knowing it." | |
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Jean Baptiste Moliare
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| "I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I
have was that I didn"t study Latin harder in school so I could converse
with those people." | |
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J. Danforth Quayle
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| "It often shows an excellent command of language to say
nothing." | |
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Karol Newlin
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| "It?s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can
get you into hot water." | |
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Franklin P. Jones
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| "Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides." | |
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Rita Mae Brown
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| "Language is the armoury of the human mind, and at once contains the
trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests." | |
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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| "Language is the light of the mind." | |
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John Stuart Mill
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| "Language shows a man, speak that I may see thee." | |
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Ben Jonson
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| "LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding
another"s treasure." | |
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Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
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| "No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his
mouth shut." | |
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Sam Rayburn
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| "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure
wind." | |
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George Orwell
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| "Saying nothing often shows a fine command of language." | |
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Unknown
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| "Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and
goes to work." | |
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Carl Sandburg
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| "Syllables govern the world." | |
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John Selden
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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." | |
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Aldous Huxley
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| "The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing
detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words." | |
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Hippocrates
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| "The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from
sticking to the matter at hand." | |
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Lewis Thomas
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| "To every obstacle oppose patience, perseverance and soothing
language." | |
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Thomas Jefferson
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|
| "We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.
Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining
framework for it." | |
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Benjamin Whorf
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| "We live by trust, in part by hope, in part by inquiry, patiently and
humbly pursued. And to the degree that these sensibilities of our
creaturehood are observed, the pursuit of intelligibility and
understanding in [our] faith is a creative adventure full of promise in
expanding, sensitizing, illumining, and hopefully fulfilling this
pilgrimage of existing. Every other mode of seeking to wrest the fire and
efficacy of reality, either by way of sanctioning those who presume to
believe, or as ground for registering reality"s curse upon those who
presume not to believe in accordance with the prescribed language of human
forms and symbols, is blasphemous, and carries within its own degree of
dementia. And this, I submit, is the judgment of reality itself; not of
any human formulation dependent upon the language of our fallible forms
and symbols." | |
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Bernard Eugene Meland
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| "When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man
relies on the language of the first." | |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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| "Words differently arranged have a different meaning and meanings
differently arranged have a different effect." | |
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Blaise Pascal
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