Language Quotes

"Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do."

"There is no other language as similar to Hebrew like Arabic."

"There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge."

"I sing in Arabic as a statement. It's art, and it's a challenge."

"Hebrew is the language I use to thank the Creator and, also, to swear on the road."

"When I write in Hebrew, I don't look for sophistication in music; it's just pure emotion that comes out."

"Shakespeare's taught me that there are more words in the English language than I have got in my head."

"Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?"

"English is not my first language."

"Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do."

"I hate using the word 'dark' for things that are negative."

"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power."

Paul Engle

"Poetry is the language of a state of crisis."

Stéphane Mallarmé

"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."

Rita Dove

"Language is the dress of thought."

Samuel Johnson

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

George Orwell

“Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, synecdoche, metonymy, the whole bag of tricks.”

“Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue.”

“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.”

“In most legislatures, punctilious attention to correct usage is considered elitist. The word "government," for example, is normally pronounced "gummint."

“Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.”

"Crazy" is a term of art; "Insane" is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble.”