Flowers have a language. [ Swain ]
The language spoken by angels. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Good language cures great sores. [ Proverb ]
Flowers are love's truest language. [ Park Benjamin ]
Fair language grates not the tongue. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
In one soft look what language lies! [ Dibdin ]
Eloquence is the language of Nature. [ Colton ]
The eyes have one language everywhere. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Tears are the silent language of grief. [ Voltaire ]
Tears are the noble language of the eye. [ Robert Herrick ]
The only true language of love is a kiss. [ A. de Musset ]
The alphabet is a first step in language. [ A. Boyle ]
All foreign wisdom doth amount to this,
To take all that is given, whether wealth,
Or love, or language; nothing comes amiss;
A good digestion turneth all to health. [ Herbert ]
Music is the universal language of mankind. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Dictionaries are word-pictures of language. [ Cox ]
To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. [ Bryant ]
The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains - Beautiful!
I linger yet with nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learned the language of another world. [ Byron ]
His folded flock secure, the shepherd home
Hies merry-hearted; and by turns relieves
The ruddy milk-maid of her brimming pail;
The beauty whom perhaps his witless heart.
Unknowing what the joy-mixed anguish means,
Sincerely loves, by that best language shown
Of cordial glances, and obliging deeds. [ Thomson ]
But what am I? An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language but a cry. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Love is a child that talks in broken language,
Yet then he speaks most plain. [ Dryden ]
The true and the false speak the same language. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
Language is the close-fitting dress of Thought. [ R. C. Trench ]
Spake full well, in language quaint and olden,
One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine,
When he called the flowers, so blue and golden,
Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine. [ Longfellow ]
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip.
Nay, her foot speaks. [ William Shakespeare ]
Flowers are Love's truest language; they betray,
Like the divining rods of Magi old,
Where precious wealth lies buried, not of gold,
But love - strong love, that never can decay! [ Park Benjamin ]
Words, however, are things; and the man who accords
To his language the license to outrage his soul
Is controlled by the words he disdains to control. [ Lord Lytton ]
There were no ill language, if it were not ill taken. [ Proverb ]
It is in the eyes that the language of love is written. [ Mme. Cottin ]
The finest language is chiefly made up of unimposing words. [ George Eliot ]
Both my language and my sentiments differ widely from theirs. [ Horace ]
Music! - O, how faint, how weak, language fades before thy spell! [ Moore ]
Every nation has its own language as well as its own temperament. [ Voltaire ]
Tangible language, which often tells more falsehoods than truths. [ Abraham Lincoln ]
Accent is the soul of language: it gives to it feeling and truth. [ Rousseau ]
There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture. [ William Shakespeare ]
Ennui is a growth of English root, though nameless in our language. [ Byron ]
They have been at a great feast of language, and stolen the scraps.
They have lived long in the alms-basket of words! [ William Shakespeare ]
Meditation is the tongue of the soiu and the language of our spirit. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Poetry is the music of thought, conveyed to us in music of language. [ Chatfield ]
Persuasive, yet denying eyes, all eloquent with language of their own. [ Locke ]
Infatuation is the language of a beautiful eye upon a sensitive heart. [ Joseph Bartlett ]
Libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age. [ G. Bancroft ]
Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language. [ Landor ]
Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools. [ Colton ]
No literature is complete until the language in which it is written is dead. [ Longfellow ]
The world is a book, the language of which is unintelligible to many people. [ Mery ]
No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful. [ Colton ]
If a gentleman be to study any language, it ought to be that of his own country. [ Locke ]
Genius does not need a special language; it newly uses whatever tongue it finds. [ Stedman ]
The alphabet of a language is the key by which we unlock the thoughts of its people. [ Alabaster ]
Every genius has most power in his own language, and every heart in its own religion. [ Jean Paul ]
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language. [ Samuel Johnson ]
Sweet tears! the awful language eloquent of infinite affection, far too big for words. [ Pollok ]
In her starry shade of dim and solitary loveliness, I learn the language of another world. [ Byron ]
Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other. [ Lord Chesterfield ]
To judge a country one does not know the language of is like judging a book from the binding.
The speech of the tongue is best known to men; God best understands the language of the heart. [ Warwick ]
'Tis sweet to stammer one letter of the Eternal's language; on earth it is called forgiveness. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Lovers have in their language an infinite number of words, in which each syllable is a caress. [ Rochepedre ]
When reduced by adversity, a man forgets the lofty tone and supercilious language of prosperity.
A blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories. [ George Eliot ]
That is not good language which all understand not He that burns his house warms himself for once. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Poesy is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one language into another, it will evaporate. [ Denham ]
Unkind language is sure to produce the fruits of unkindness - that is, suffering in the bosom of others. [ Benthem ]
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. [ Coleridge ]
The wit of language is so miserably inferior to the wit of ideas that it is very deservedly driven out of good company. [ Sydney Smith ]
There is a lore simple and sure, that asks no discipline of weary years - the language of the soul, told through the eye. [ Mrs. Sigourney ]
Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language. [ Mackintosh ]
Assertion, unsupported by fact, is nugatory; surmise and general abuse, in however elegant language, ought not to pass for proofs. [ Junius ]
In strictness of language there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom; wisdom always supposing action and action directed by it. [ Paley ]
If the wave could speak in any other language than that of its own harsh thunder, how many tales of agony and suffering might it unfold. [ Selkirk ]
No man ever did or ever will become truly eloquent without being a constant reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language. [ Fisher Ames ]
In those countries where the morals are the most dissolute, the language is the most severe; as if they would replace on the lips what has deserted the heart. [ Voltaire ]
Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. [ Washington Irving ]
Health - the silliest word in our language, and one knows the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Liquid, flowing words are the choicest and the best, if language is regarded as music. But when it is considered as a picture, then there are rough words which are very telling, - they make their mark. [ Joubert ]
Music moves us, and we know not why; we feel the tears, and cannot trace the source. Is it the language of some other state, born of its memory? For what can wake the soul's strong instinct of another world, like music? [ Miss L. E. Landon ]
The curse and peril of language in our day, and particularly in this country, is that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance, use it ill according to their affected knowledge. [ Richard Grant White ]
The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they have been written. [ Sir William Jones ]
Without attempting a formal definition of the word, I am inclined to consider rhetoric, when reduced to a system in books, as a body of rules derived from experience and observation, extending to all communications by language, and designed to make it efficient. [ W. E. Channing ]
No language can express the power and beauty, and heroism and majesty of a mother's love; it shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star in heaven. [ E. H. Chapin ]
The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium. [ G. S. Hillard ]
Nowadays enthusiasm is accounted folly; truth, cynicism; dissimulation, self-control; stiffness of manners, dignity; deception, cleverness; hypocrisy, decency; selfishness, economy; freedom of thought, effrontery; and superstition, the prop of human morals. What progress in language!
Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions - these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term experience.
[ G. H. Lewes ]
The flitting sunbeam has been grasped and made to do man's bidding in place of the painter's pencil. And although Franklin tamed the lightning, yet not until yesterday has its instantaneous flash been made the vehicle of language: thus in the transmission of thought annihilating space and time. [ Professor Robinson ]
The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, - a general preparation for whatever species of the art the student may afterwards choose for his more particular application. The power of drawing, modelling, and using colors is very properly called the language of the art. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; the passions are powerful pleaders, and their very silence, like that of Garrick, goes directly to the soul, but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in; it is the quackery of eloquence, and deals in nostrums, not in cures. [ Colton ]
The language of the heart - the language which comes from the heart
and goes to the heart
- is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language - difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied. [ Bovee ]
The habit of exaggeration in language should be guarded against; it misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive; it imposes on us the society of a balloon, when a moderately-sized skull would fill the place much better; it begets much evil in promising what it cannot perform, and we have often found the most glowing declarations of intended good services end in mere Irish vows. [ Eliza Cook ]
He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously; who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them. [ Washington Irving ]
The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]
Why has the beneficent Creator scattered over the face of the earth such a profusion of beautiful flowers? Why is it that every landscape has its appropriate flowers, every nation its national flowers, every rural home its home flowers? Why do flowers enter and shed their perfume over every scene of life, from the cradle to the grave? Why are flowers made to utter all voices of joy and sorrow in all varying scenes? It is that flowers have in themselves a real and natural significance; they have a positive relation to man; they correspond to actual emotions; they have their mission - a mission of love and mercy; they have their language, and from the remotest ages this language has found its interpreters. [ Henrietta Dumont ]
Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]