John Ruskin Quotes

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Those who have reflected on the powerful influence of language on thought will perceive in how different a manner people who speak in different languages are apt to think.

Be it Hindi or Hinglish, Zee was never and will never be speechless.

I think speaking English is beautiful.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.

Technology is a vocabulary and a language in which you can say many things.

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.

If we had no language we'd have nothing.

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

The nature of language may determine what most people say, but I always speak my own meaning.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

Language does our thinking for us.