John Sterling Quotes

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

You couldn't have human society without language.

Language is a social art.

We must plow through the whole of language.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.

Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

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