- Languages, like our bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of recruits to supply those words which are continually falling into disuse (C. C. Felton)
- Language is incomplete and fragmentary, and merely registers a stage in the average advance beyond ape-mentality. But all men enjoy flashes of insight beyond meanings already stabilized in etymology and grammar. (Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 1933)
- Language is human system of communication that uses arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. (Richard Nordquist)
- 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)
- Language is an art, like brewing or baking; but writing would have been a better simile. It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt. It differs, however, widely from all ordinary arts, for man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; whilst no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write. Moreover, no philologist now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented; it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps.(Charles Darwin, Th e Descent of Man, 1871)
- Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations. (Edward Sapir)
- Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. (Gustave Flaubert)
- Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way. (Edward de Bono)
- The language is an intermediate object between sound and thought: it consists in uniting both while simultaneously decomposing them. (Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 1964)
- Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden. (Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta)
- 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 is intrinsically approximate, since words mean different things to different people, and there is no material retaining ground for the imagery that words conjure in one brain or another. (John Updike, The New Yorker, December 15, 1997)
- Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1916)
- Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. (Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, 1964)
- Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953)
- In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned. (Richard Duppa, Maxims, 1830)
- Language is generally described as a system of sounds used to link sound using words and sentences to meaning (Finegan & Besnier 1989, p. 1).
- 18. The special vocabulary and usages of a scientific, professional, or other group: "his total mastery of screen languagecamera placement, editingand his handling of actors" (Jack Kroll).
- Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," 1844)
- 20. Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects (William Hazlitt)
Sources:
grammar.about.com, wikipedia encyclopedia,
the free online dictionary,
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