71 Language Quotes to share with friends and relatives

Verbing weirds language. – Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought. – William James

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. – Steven Wright

“Seize the day” drains dignity from “Carpe diem.” – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010, about translation

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words…. Be not the slave of Words… – Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr TeufelsdrÃ¶ckh, 1

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool. Such men have the quaint habit of discovering things fifty years after all the world knows about them â€” because they read only their own language. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962) #bilingual #trilingual

If I could but entice you with sentences and tongue tie you with words. – Jamie Lynn Morris

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. – Alfred North Whitehead

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. – George Orwell

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words. – Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Note-Books

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers. – Doug Larson

Our language is funny â€” a fat chance and slim chance are the same thing. – J. Gustav White

He swore at us in German (which I should judge to be a singularly effective language for that purpose)… – Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), 1889

Words want to be free! – Anonymous

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it. – Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 4

Oaths are but words, and words but wind. – Samuel Butler (1612-1680), Hudribas

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me. – Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity. – Gustave Flaubert

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all. – Winston Churchill