When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

George Steiner
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world...
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world...
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world...
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world...
About This Quote

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. This quote reflects the danger of losing your language when you are forced to adapt to someone else’s. You no longer have a word for everyday things, every little thing is something new and strange. When I was in school I learned English, but after that my family gave me two languages to learn: Hindi and English.

I learned them both quickly enough. But the Hindi words that end up in my English sentences are different from the Hindi words that end up in my father’s English sentences. And the English words that end up in my mother’s Indian sentence are different from the English words that end up in my grandmother’s sentence.

They can’t all be right, so how do they fit together?

Some Similar Quotes
  1. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. - Elie Wiesel

  2. Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We... - Haruki Murakami

  3. The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace. - Mahatma Gandhi

  4. He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. - Milan Kundera

  5. It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters, - Amit Ray

More Quotes By George Steiner
  1. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

  2. We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.

  3. Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

  4. What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough

  5. The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

Related Topics