Gallery 0015 — permanent collection

Language

Q: Who said “brevity is the soul of wit”?

Shakespeare, in Hamlet — but it is spoken by Polonius, the most long-winded character in the play, in the middle of a long-winded speech. The irony is deliberate.

A room for anyone learning English, or writing in it. The recurring claim here is unsettling: that language does not merely express thought but sets its shape.

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“A different language is a different vision of life.”

Attributed to Federico Fellini
What it means. The strong form of this claim — that the language you speak sets the boundary of what you can perceive — has been argued over by linguists for a century and is largely rejected in its hard version. Fellini states it as settled fact. He was a filmmaker, in the business of showing people things they had no other way of seeing, so the overstatement is at least in character.

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“He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.”

Attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What it means. The argument is that a monolingual cannot see their own language at all, because its choices look like necessities from the inside. Only a second language reveals the first as one option among many — that German puts the verb there, that English insists on a subject, that neither had to. You cannot describe the water until you have been out of it.

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“Learn a new language and get a new soul.”

Czech proverb
What it means. A bolder claim than it first sounds: not that a language is a tool you pick up, but a self you become. Bilingual speakers do report shifting personality between their languages, and researchers have found the effect measurable rather than imagined — which makes this one of the few proverbs that turned out to be roughly right.

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“Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.”

Attributed to Flora Lewis
What it means. Flora Lewis was a foreign correspondent, not a linguist, and this reads like a working note. She spent a career filing stories from countries whose politics did not map onto English categories, where the reporter’s problem is not finding the word but discovering there isn’t one.

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“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

Rudyard Kipling
What it means. Not a compliment. A drug is something that enters you and acts before you have agreed to it, which is exactly the property Kipling is naming — and he is naming it as a practitioner, not an observer. He had spent a career proving the point, a great deal of it in the service of an empire.

Other works

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“Language is the dress of thought.”

Samuel Johnson
What it means. Usually quoted as praise of good style. In context it is the opposite: Johnson is criticising poets whose ornament had swallowed their meaning. Dress flatters or fails, and — the part the metaphor is really doing — it comes off. Johnson had just spent nine years writing a dictionary, so he knew precisely how detachable a word is from a thought.

Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

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“Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Attributed to William Shakespeare
What it means. The most famous line about being brief is delivered by Polonius, in the middle of the longest and most padded speech in the play — and the queen listening to him interrupts a moment later with “More matter, with less art.” Shakespeare is not stating the maxim. He is having a character recite it while breaking it.

Hamlet, Act II sc. ii — spoken by Polonius, at length

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“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

Attributed to Blaise Pascal
What it means. Quoted as a witticism; written as an apology. It is from a letter of 1657, and Pascal meant it literally — cutting requires knowing exactly what you meant, which takes longer than not knowing. The line has since been re-credited to Twain, Cicero, Churchill and Voltaire, which is roughly what happens to any sentence that sounds like a joke.

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“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

Attributed to Cicero
What it means. Books as the animating part: shelves not as furnishing but as evidence that someone in the room has an interior. There is an irony the sentence cannot escape — the most quoted line in praise of books is itself a misquotation, and has been passed around for a century under the wrong name.

The thought is Ciceronian; these words are not his. They come from Sir John Lubbock’s essay “On the Pleasure of Reading” (1886), where he was paraphrasing Cicero — and the paraphrase has been quoted as the original ever since.

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“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

Attributed to Jane Austen
What it means. A compliment disguised as a complaint, and a precise description of what good prose actually feels like: not effort, but time going missing. The only fault available to it is stopping. Austen’s own novels are notably short.

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“The desire to write grows with writing.”

Attributed to Erasmus
What it means. Motivation is usually taught backwards — wait to feel like working, then work. Erasmus reverses the order and puts the appetite downstream of the act. He produced an enormous body of work, so the claim comes with its own evidence attached.

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

John Maynard Keynes
What it means. Almost always quoted as a licence for vivid writing. Keynes withdrew it in the very next sentence: once the seats of power and authority have been attained, he wrote, there should be no more poetic licence. Wildness is for the outsider making an argument, not for the person who has won it.

“National Self-Sufficiency”, The Yale Review, June 1933

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“All language is an alphabet of symbols whose use presupposes a past shared by all.”

Attributed to Jorge Luis Borges
What it means. Borges wrote this inside a story about a man who has seen the entire universe at once and cannot report it. That is the trap the sentence describes: words work only because we hold a past in common, so an experience nobody shares has no alphabet available to it.

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“Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.”

Attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
What it means. Holmes was a physician and an anatomist before he was an essayist, and the metaphor is professional rather than decorative. Blood is not a container. It circulates, feeds, and carries things away — which makes this a claim about what language does to a thought, not about how it stores one.

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“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.”

Attributed to Frank Smith
What it means. Smith was a psycholinguist, and the image concedes more than it seems. A corridor still leads somewhere; the monolingual is not stuck, only unable to turn. What a second language adds is not distance travelled but the number of places where a choice exists.

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“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Attributed to Mark Twain
What it means. The image is exact rather than pretty. A lightning bug produces light with no heat and no force, which is precisely what a nearly-right word does to a sentence: it illuminates without striking anything. Both words may be perfectly grammatical. Only one arrives.

As published the line reads: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” The version in circulation, and the one shown here, has drifted from it.

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“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What it means. Routinely read as an encouragement to learn more words. It is not about vocabulary at all — 5.6 concerns logical form, the structure any language must share with the world to say anything true about it. Wittgenstein then ends the book by calling his own propositions nonsense, a ladder to be pushed away once climbed.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922 — proposition 5.6

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“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

Attributed to Rumi
What it means. A strange thing to find in a room about words, and the best argument in it. Every sentence is a lossy rendering of something that was complete before it was said.

Popular English Rumi is almost always a modern rendering rather than a translation — most often Coleman Barks, who works from other scholars’ literal versions and writes his own free English. The wording here is therefore a modern author’s; the idea is Rumi’s. Where no Persian original could be matched, the label says attributed.

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“Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.”

Attributed to the Buddha
What it means. A ratio, stated as if it were arithmetic. What counts is effect, and volume is treated as evidence of its absence.

Usually given as Dhammapada 100

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“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

Mark Twain
What it means. The joke is an actual rule of practice. The distortion is licensed only after the facts exist to distort.

Quoted by Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 1899

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“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”

Attributed to Rumi
What it means. Separates force from volume by pointing at weather, where the loud part and the effective part are demonstrably different things.

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Pascal's apology is the best writing advice here

“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter” is a joke and a complete method. Length is what you produce first; brevity is what remains after work. It sits oddly next to Shakespeare’s “brevity is the soul of wit” — spoken, in Hamlet, by Polonius, who is incapable of it. Between them they cover the whole problem: everyone knows short is better, and short is the expensive one.

A hundred and fifty years, and nothing older

Every datable line in this room sits between 1779 and 1933. Nothing ancient, which is strange for a subject the ancients wrote about constantly. The explanation is that classical writing about language is technical — grammar, rhetoric, the parts of an argument — and technical writing does not produce quotable sentences. The idea that a language is a way of seeing rather than a tool for describing is modern, and so is every line here that says so.

What is the best quote about learning a language?

Federico Fellini’s “a different language is a different vision of life” is the most quoted, and the Czech proverb — “learn a new language and get a new soul” — says it in seven words. Goethe’s is the sharpest: he who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

Who said “brevity is the soul of wit”?

Shakespeare, in Hamlet — but it is spoken by Polonius, the most long-winded character in the play, in the middle of a long-winded speech. The irony is deliberate.

Did Mark Twain say “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the dif…”?

As published the line reads: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” The version in circulation, and the one shown here, has drifted from it. It is filed here as attributed to Mark Twain, which means widely credited and not traced to a primary source.

Did Cicero say “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”?

The thought is Ciceronian; these words are not his. They come from Sir John Lubbock’s essay “On the Pleasure of Reading” (1886), where he was paraphrasing Cicero — and the paraphrase has been quoted as the original ever since. It is filed here as attributed to Cicero, which means widely credited and not traced to a primary source.

Next door, in the dictionary

logos

word, reason and argument in one — the idea this whole room circles.

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