Power Of Language Quotes

It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

Right around my first year of college - I remember "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison, just moved me tremendously. The power of language and how it can peel back truths, bring things to the surface. So I learned a lot from fiction.

It is said that life and death are under the power of language.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.

In prosperous times I have sometimes felt my fancy and powers of language flag, but adversity is to me at least a tonic and bracer.

Language is power, in ways more literal than most people think. When we speak, we exercise the power of language to transform reality. Why don't more of us realize the connection between language and power?

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

One of the benefits of being a mature well-educated woman is that you're not afraid of expletives. And you have no fear to put a fool in his place. That's the power of language and experience. You can learn a lot from Shakespeare.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

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

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

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

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.