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Quotes

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

—Martin Heidegger, 1949

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

—Voltaire, c. 1732

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

—John Locke, 1690

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

—Bertrand Russell, 1961

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

—Carl Sandburg, 1959

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

—The Book of Changes, c. 350 BC

Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.

—Tertullian, c. 217

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

—Robert Burton, 1621

It is a luxury to be understood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831

Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

—Jane Austen, 1818

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

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

—George Orwell, 1944