Human Language Quotes

• Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Communication, Thinking, Shapes

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• Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

  Noam Chomsky

  Animal, Unique, World

  Noam Chomsky (2006). “Language and Mind”, p.59, Cambridge University Press

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• If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Communication, Different, World

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• Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Communication, Cities, Language And Power

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.160

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• Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Language Words, Law, Generations

  Noam Chomsky (2003). “For Reasons Of State”, p.402, Penguin Books India

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• Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Business, Communication, Past

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). “The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Prose and Verse: Complete in One Volume”, p.313

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• The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.

  Henri Delacroix

  Communication, Thought Provoking, Language

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• Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Running, Communication, Inspiration

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• One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Judging, Language

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”, p.409, Penguin UK

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• There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

  Dale Carnegie

  Inspirational, Motivational, Communication

  Dale Carnegie, Dorothy Carnegie (1977). “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking”, p.159, Simon and Schuster

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• We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

  Charles Taylor

  Expression, Understanding, Identity

  Charles Taylor (1992). “The Ethics of Authenticity”, p.33, Harvard University Press

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• Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.

  Noam Chomsky

  Animal, Language, Humans

  Source: libcom.org

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• Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Men, Logic, Language

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• We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.

  Kofi Annan

  Acceptance, Race, Skin Color

  Twitter post from Sep 03, 2016

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• There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind

  Noam Chomsky

  Character, Mind, Principles

  Noam Chomsky (2006). “Language and Mind”, p.90, Cambridge University Press

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• The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

  Garth Stein

  Language, Humans, Stills

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• Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution.

  Donald Johanson

  Art, Unique, Animal

  "How Will Humans Evolve?". bigthink.com. 2017.

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• Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Men, Speech, Way

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Homer A. Jack (2005). “The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi”, p.27, Courier Corporation

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• The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love.

  Paul Eluard

  Doe, Body, Flesh

  Paul Eluard, “At The Window”

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• For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.

  David Abram

  Expression, Australia, Vitality

  David Abram (2012). “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World”, p.179, Vintage

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• There is a language beyond human language, an elemental language, one that arises from the land itself.

  Linda Hogan

  Land, Language, Arise

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• Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Independent, Hands, Years

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• As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

  Umberto Eco

  Philosophy, Lying, Want

  "Umberto Eco: 'People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged'". Interview with Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. November 27, 2011.

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• The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.

  David Abram

  Singing, Events, Culture

  David Abram (2012). “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World”, p.163, Vintage

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• No one seriously doubts that if Piraha children are brought up in Boston they'll be speaking Boston English, that is, that the capacities are present, unlike other animals, as far as is known. There's no challenge to the theory - not mine, but everyone's - that the human language faculty provides the means for generation of an infinite array of structured expressions.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Mean, Animal

  Source: libcom.org

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