Sermon Quotes on Language

Francis Asbury

God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.

W.H. Auden

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Ambrose Bierce

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

Angela Carter

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

Winston Churchill

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

S.D. Gordon

Jesus was God spelling himself out in language humanity could understand.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

John Maynard Keynes

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

C.S. Lewis

Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then you either don’t understand it or you don’t believe it.

Eugene Peterson

Language is primarily a means of revelation, both for God and for us. Using words, God reveals himself to us. Using words, we reveal ourselves to God and to one another. By means of language, the entire cycle of speaking and listening, both God and his Word-created men and women are able to reveal vast interiors otherwise inaccessible to us.

Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in his Stories and Prayers

Eugene Peterson

The Christian gospel is rooted in language: God spoke a creation into being; our Savior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a relationship, shape beauty, form truth…

Lily Tomlin

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk together, speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it. Speech connects us so immediately and vitally because it is a physical, bodily process, to begin with.

The Wave in the Mind

Feggy Ostrosky-Solís

“Learning how to read, has been shown to “powerfully shape adult neuropsychological systems. Brain scans have also revealed that people whose written language uses logographic symbols, like the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is considerably different from the circuitry found in people whose written language employs a phonetic alphabet.

Ostrosky-Solís, Miguel Arellano García, and Martha Pérez, “Can Learning to Read and Write Change the Brain Organization? An Electrophysio-logical Study,” International Journal of Psychology, 39, no. 1 (2004): 27–35.

Alan J. Roxburgh

Language is the realm of the poet, of desire and hope, of the search for and expression of infinity.

Missional (Allelon Missional Series): Joining God in the Neighborhood