Language Quotes - Page 4

Music is the Universal Language that allows all people to communicate with each other.

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus.

Walter M. Miller Jr

The locust has no kingJust noise and hard languageThey talk me over

David Eugene Edwards

Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee.

Ben Jonson

To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

S.I. Hayakawa

Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I’d gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were “stressed out”.

David Sedaris

The unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created languages to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions come from ancient comic writers. And the ultimate goal of comics is same as the purpose of humanity – to break free from language.

Manu Joseph

You are. Before you are whatever you are labeled.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.

Francis A.Schaeffer

Language is the light of the mind.

John Stuart Mill

My people? Who are they?I went into the church where the congregationWorshiped my God. Were they my people?I felt no kinship to them as they knelt there.My people! Where are they?I went into the land where I was born,Where men spoke my language.I was a stranger there.“My people,” my soul cried. “Who are my people?”Last night in the rain I met an old manWho spoke a language I do not speak,Which marked him as one who does not know my God.With apologetic smile he offered meThe shelter of his patched umbrella.I met his eyes...And then I knew...

Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni

The tongue of man is a twisty thing.

Homer

Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head—a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind—and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time.

George du Maurier

They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.

E.M. Forster

Music is the language of all. It tames the savage beast and allows us to get over heartbreak. It helps us express what we really want to say and it has the power to lift hearts and awaken our souls….

James A. Murphy

If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.

Bill Bryson

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

E.M. Forster

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

William Gibson

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.

Victor Klemperer

Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

Cynthia Ozick

That one of history’s greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.

Ross King

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.

Heinrich Heine

Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can describe in any page-filling paragraph that can't be captured better in just a sentence or two? Perhaps even nothing in any sentence which cannot better be refined in a single, spot-on word? Does it not follow, then, that there's likely nothing one can say in any word - in saying anything at all - that, ultimately, isn't better left unsaid? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

Mort W. Lumsden

...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.

Peter Sloterdijk

If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.

Friedrich Hebbel

The topics which language limits us to aren’t much worth discussing in the first place.(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

Mort W. Lumsden

ll our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters" from other tongues and cultures.

Amos Oz

When two lovers discover a language of their own.

Saleem Sharma

Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise but, if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.

Terry Pratchett

This is the Southland burr, the only distinctive regional accent in the country. It's a soft appealing noise, deriving, I presume, from the Sottish settlers, but resembling no known Scottish accent. It's simply Kiwi English with added r's.

Joe Bennett

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.

Spencer Gordon

A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man

Frederick Douglass

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

Judith Butler

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.

G H Hardy

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

Joseph Brodsky

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

Roland Barthes

Hey dawg, wassup?" he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment.

Craig Ferguson

That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing," Frances informs her niece. "That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

Alice Hoffman

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.

Julia Penelope

Learn to say “please” and “thank you” in multiple languages.

Steve Maraboli

To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.

Spyridon Marinatos

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates.

Melvin Schwartz

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.

James Joseph Sylvester

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.

Peter Sloterdijk

Body language has no translation.

Ljupka Cvetanova

No. See, when you throw up you're vomiting, but when you throw down you're starting a fight, as in throwing down the gauntlet.""Ohhhh," he said. "I thought you were speaking literally.""I do beg your pardon. Let's literally throw up, but figuratively throw down.

Kevin Hearne

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

Susan Sontag

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

Jeanette Winterson

He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat

Sara Sheridan

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

Sue Monk Kidd

The Biblical language was so deeply embedded in the great man's mind that it became his normal way of speaking.

Elton Trueblood

...he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love.

The Alchemist

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Louise Erdrich

Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.

David Mitchell

At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.

Octavio Paz

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 … 27 Next

Language Quotes - Page 4

Related Topics