Famous quotes containing the words human and/or language:
“No Ravens wing can stretch the flight so far
As the torn bandrols of Napoleons war.
Choose then your climate, fix your best abode,
Hell make you deserts and hell bring you blood.
How could you fear a dearth? have not mankind,
Tho slain by millions, millions left behind?
Has not conscription still the power to weild
Her annual faulchion oer the human field?
A faithful harvester!”
—Joel Barlow (17541812)
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. 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 (18031882)