157 Written Language Quotes

Following is our list of written language quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about what is language.

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Famous Written Language Quotes

Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram. — Lance Morrow

Being that can be understood is language. - Hans-Georg Gadamer

Being that can be understood is language. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought. — Mark Hopkins

Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent; for they introduce words by the eye, not by the ear. — Isidore of Seville

Speech is the representation of the mind, and writing is the representation of speech. — Aristotle

Its focus wasn't on the written word but how the word was written. - Neville Brody

Its focus wasn't on the written word but how the word was written. — Neville Brody

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations. — Edward Sapir

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus. — Marshall McLuhan

Languages are the pedigree of nations. — Samuel Johnson

Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade before the public. — George W. Crane

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted. — George Boole

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

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

Art is literacy of the heart — Elliot W. Eisner

Short Written Language Quotes

  • Language is wine upon the lips. — Virginia Woolf
  • Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing. — Lytton Strachey
  • Language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly. — Kató Lomb
  • Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language. — Theodore Bikel
  • ...language is never innocent. — Roland Barthes
  • Writing is the geometry of the soul. — Plato

Written Language Image Quotes

Written language quote Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Written Language Quotes

The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics. — Galileo Galilei

Men of few words are the best men." (3.2.41) - William Shakespeare

Men of few words are the best men." (3.2.41) — William Shakespeare

Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. — Galileo Galilei

Written language quote A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.

The chief virtue that language can have is clarity. — Hippocrates

I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: 'Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.' — Thaddeus Stevens

Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image. — Bianca Jagger

Written language quote Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.
Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.

Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage. — Marilyn vos Savant

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. — Hart Crane

Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live. — Holmes Rolston III

The shorter and the plainer the better. — Beatrix Potter

What Is Language Quotes

The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are. — Ludwig van Beethoven

The world is not the most pleasant place. Eventually, your parents leave you and nobody is going to go out of their way to protect you unconditionally. You need to learn to stand up for yourself and what you believe and sometimes, pardon my language, kick some ass. — Queen Elizabeth II

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language. — Noam Chomsky

Written language quote The language of friendship is not words, but meanings.
The language of friendship is not words, but meanings.

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously. — Julio Cortazar

It gives a message to people of love... it does not matter what's the colour of your skin, what language do you speak, what religion do you believe in. It is that we should all consider each other as human beings and we should respect each other. — Malala Yousafzai

What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language. — Miuccia Prada

Written language quote Love will find its way through all languages on its own.
Love will find its way through all languages on its own.

Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside? — Jackson Browne

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience. — Dale Carnegie

What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself — Amin Maalouf

One of my big philosophies is that fighting is the sport that crosses all borders. I don't care what color you are, what country you come from or what language you speak, fighting is in our DNA. We get it and we like it. — Dana White

How Are Quotes

If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be. — Maya Angelou

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom. — Charles Spurgeon

You never know how strong you are, until being strong is your only choice. - Bob Marley

You never know how strong you are, until being strong is your only choice. — Bob Marley

Written language quote When written in Chinese the word "Crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and t
When written in Chinese the word "Crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game. — Voltaire

If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought. — Peace Pilgrim

It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action. - Fidel Castro

It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action. — Fidel Castro

Written language quote If a book is well written, I always find it too short.
If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

It doesn't matter how strong your opinions are. If you don't use your power for positive change, you are, indeed, part of the problem. — Coretta Scott King

Never make a permanent decision based on a temporary storm.. No matter how raging the billows are today, remind yourself: "This too shall pass!" — T. D. Jakes

As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves. - Carl Rogers

As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves. — Carl Rogers

The test of success is not what you do when you are on top. Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom. — George S. Patton

What Are Quotes

I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. - Roy Croft

I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. — Roy Croft

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. — Albert Schweitzer

We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. - Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. — Aristotle

Written language quote Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done. — Jean Piaget

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. — John Wooden

Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way. — Martin Luther King

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are. - Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are. — Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow. — William Shakespeare

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage. — Winston Churchill

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. - Mahatma Gandhi

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. — Mahatma Gandhi

Written Word Quotes

I have written a song that says: If you ever lose someone dear to you, never say the words, "They're gone," and they'll come back. — Prince

I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily. — Isaac Newton

If we once get above our Bibles and cease making the written Word of God our sole rule both as to faith and practice, we shall soon lie open to all manner of delusion and be in great danger of making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience. — George Whitefield

Written language quote The ability to speak several languages is an asset, but the ability to keep your mouth shut in any l
The ability to speak several languages is an asset, but the ability to keep your mouth shut in any language is priceless.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.' — Max Planck

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. — Terence McKenna

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence. — Paul Simon

Written language quote In your silence, when there are no words, no language, nobody else is present, you are getting in tu
In your silence, when there are no words, no language, nobody else is present, you are getting in tune with existence.

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning. — Lydia M. Child

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. — Vladimir Nabokov

I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by men who were inspired. I study the Bible daily. Opposition to godliness is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. — Isaac Newton

The Bible is God's declaratory revelation to man containing the great truths about God, about man, about history, about salvation, and about prophecy that God wanted us to know. The Bible could be trusted just as much as if God had taken the pen and written the words Himself. — John F Walvoord

Spoken Language Quotes

Love your country. Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart, blushing, whispered the first word of love; it is the home that God has given you that by striving to perfect yourselves therein you may prepare to ascend to him. — Giuseppe Mazzini

When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell! — William Halsey

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. — Marshall McLuhan

Written language quote There are hundreds of languages around the world, but a smile speaks them all.
There are hundreds of languages around the world, but a smile speaks them all.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos. — Prince Charles

Of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren't spoken by the children. In one generation, we're going to halve our cultural diversity. — Phil Borges

In the silence of the Cross, the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue and peace is spoken. — Pope Francis

Sometimes during solitude I hear truth spoken with clarity and freshness; uncolored and untranslated it speaks from within myself in a language original but inarticulate, heard only with the soul, and I realize I brought it with me, was never taught it nor can I efficiently teach it to another. — Hugh B. Brown

But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright. — Bob Goff

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. — Robert Louis Stevenson

First it must be known that only a spoken word or a conventional sign is an equivocal or univocal term; therefore a mental contentor concept is, strictly speaking, neither equivocal nor univocal. — William of Ockham

Written History Quotes

Ancient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt. — Cheikh Anta Diop

When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices. — John Shelby Spong

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? — Washington Irving

Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes. — Robert the Bruce

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice. - Mark Twain

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice. — Mark Twain

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am convinced that when the history of international law comes to be written centuries hence, it will be divided into two periods: the first being from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century, and the second beginning with the Hague Conference. — Ludwig Quidde

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul. — Emma Goldman

History is neither written nor made without love or hate. — Theodor Mommsen

History written in pencil is easily erased, but crayon is forever. — Emilie Autumn

English Writing Quotes

Good English, well spoken and well written will open more doors than a college degree... Bad English will slam doors you don't even know exist. — William Raspberry

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. — Mark Twain

All the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well. — Alfred the Great

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why. — James Joyce

I am an English major in school with an emphasis in creative writing. I think hearing Maya Angelou speak at school last year was one of the best moments Stanford, at least, intellectually, had to offer. — Fred Savage

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it. — P. D. James

Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of "somedays." Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English. — Glen Cook

I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like. — Albert Einstein

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never. — Tony Dungy

Human Language Quotes

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

There is only one caste... the caste of humanity. There is only one religion... the religion of love. There is only one language... the language of the heart. — Sathya Sai Baba

In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language. — Mikhail Tal

The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’ - Eleanor Roosevelt

Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’ — Eleanor Roosevelt

In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods. — Edward Hirsch

Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes. — Oliver Sacks

Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people. — Leon Trotsky

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

Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help. — Thomas Keating

People Writing About Written Language

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Read quotes by Lance Morrow

Lance Morrow
quotes on education, ai and culture

31 234
Read quotes by Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer
quotes on education, life and friendship

22 185
Read quotes by Mark Hopkins

Mark Hopkins
quotes on leadership, education and life

24 87
Read quotes by Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville
quotes on love, education and life

17 607
Read quotes by Aristotle

Aristotle
quotes on life, love and success

1252 18854
Read quotes by Neville Brody

Neville Brody

10 736

More Written Language Quotes

Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes. — Spencer Wells

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child — Adrienne Rich

His Majesty the King requires that the Royal Chancellery in all written documents endeavor to write in clear, plain Swedish. — Charles XII of Sweden

The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics...the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word. — Galileo Galilei

Use the smallest word that does the job. — E. B. White

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language. — Alfred North Whitehead

He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. — John Ray

I want to find a genie in a bottle that can grant me three wishes. I want to be able to speak, read, write, and understand any language ever written or spoken, just any language throughout the history of man. That would be one of my wishes from the genie, so I would have to put "multilingual" on the resume, should I ever find the genie. — Maynard James Keenan

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret. — Matthew Arnold

Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks. — Jimmy Breslin

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system. — Walker Evans

The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real, for a moment at least, that long magic moment before we wake. — George R. R. Martin

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it. — William Hazlitt

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language. — Eric Allin Cornell

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand. — Quintilian

Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten. — Jean Genet

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears. — John Muir

There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something. — Eugene H. Peterson

Be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid. — Sayings

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. — Hal Abelson

The Universe is a grand book which cannot be read until one first learns to comprehend the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics. — Galileo Galilei

Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. — Mark Twain

You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written. — Samuel Johnson

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world. — Erich Fromm

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare. — Michael Moriarty

I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language 'understand of the people.' — Bertrand Russell

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. — Rainer Maria Rilke

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them. — Hart Crane

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge — Virginia Woolf

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race. — Lafcadio Hearn

Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable. — Kenneth R. Miller

It will be my birthday on Tuesday. Last year, I reached the painful conclusion that there wasn't enough time left to read every book ever written. This year, my gloomy realisation is even more painful - I will not be able to correct everyone's mistakes before I depart. — Daniel Finkelstein

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