Language And Speech Quotes

#1. That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.

Marshall McLuhan

#2. It's a daily miracle to see a child grow and develop all the senses and language and speech and faculties, and they're so much fun and they're so delightful and they're so innocent. It just stops your heart every time; I can't get enough of it.

Jann Wenner

#3. No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

Peter Farb

#4. It is really hard to completely re-learn how to express yourself without using words. When you take away speech, you have to re-invent the way you express yourself. You have to exaggerate your body language and your facial expressions.

Jodelle Ferland

#5. Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

John McWhorter

#6. Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]

Northrop Frye

#7. Heart and Brain are the two lords of life. In the metaphors of ordinary speech and in the stricter language of science, we use these terms to indicate two central powers, from which all motives radiate, to which all influences converge.

George Henry Lewes

#8. I am beginning to worry that my speech is becoming a rather incomprehensible mixture of a Victorian woman, an Australian Beach Bum and a Laddish city boy

C.S. Woolley

#9. The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.

Steven Pinker

#10. Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.

Terry Pratchett

#11. Utterances of cursed language defiles the hearts and souls of man and many.

T.F. Hodge

#12. Growing up in a family of actors, what's great about it is that they're very supportive and they understand what it's like to be an actor - the rejections, the highs and lows ... and having a common language with them is great because you have shorthand speech.

Chris Pine

#13. I'm one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn't do Shakespeare ... The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.

Nicolas Cage

#14. [Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.

Seneca.

#15. The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.

Leonard Bloomfield

#16. Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#17. Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

Mahatma Gandhi

#18. This is what language is:
a habitual grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this:
which hurts
just enough to be a scar
And heals just enough to be a nation.

Eavan Boland

#19. He that would speak Divine things in a language which living men of to-day can comprehend, must keep up with the researches and discoveries of men who study nature, and put her words into the speech of the present.

John H. Vincent

#20. Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.

Oliver Sacks

#21. Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn't it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words.

Sol Luckman

#22. I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems ... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

Seamus Heaney

#23. Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech - what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was.

Jens Peter Jacobsen

#24. I want to give a beautiful speech at the end of the world - a rousing and inspiring collection of thoughts expressed eloquently through a dying language that is ultimately too little too late; absurd and utterly meaningless - almost insulting as life burns away.

Jonathan Douglas Duran

#25. When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.

Ellen Goodman

#26. Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.

John McGahern

#27. If we are not most careful with our thoughts and speech, the words we use will use us. Language has its own ethics, and one who communicates truth is like a bright light in the darkness.

Ted E. Brewerton

#28. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

George Bernard Shaw

#29. If anything is scary about my writing, it's that it's the product of a very particular vision and doesn't reference common speech that heavily. By 'common speech,' I don't mean language as much as an agreed-on way of seeing, or a shorthand.

Mary Gaitskill

#30. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Terry Eagleton

#31. Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, "inner speech," and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,

Oliver Sacks

#32. We've become so used to the concept as a measuring and sorting tool, that it and its correlates - below-average, above-average - are everyday speech. We don't even question the language, although the challenges we face require a different mindset.

L. Todd Rose

#33. His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

J.M. Coetzee

#34. Reality is beyond speech and thought. Only that which can be expressed in words is being said. But what cannot be put into language is indeed That which IS.

Anandamayi Ma

#35. Body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words.

Deborah Bull

#36. The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax

Thomas Paine

#37. A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children's speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.

Beatrix Campbell

#38. For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.

Dan Simmons

#39. Once he became president, George [H.] Bush revealed a vein of Styrofoam and no matter how deep he tried to go, he always ended up bobbing on the surface. His inaugural speech was like being present at the death of language ...

Kate Clinton

#40. The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.

Jonathan Swift

#41. I think it's important and I think it's true that our life experience is going to be about our attitude, our thoughts, our beliefs, our speech and our actions. We can transform our life experience simply by changing our language.

Jason Mraz

#42. I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]

Northrop Frye

#43. Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today's heritage and our new compositions to the future.

M. Fethullah Gulen

#44. So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.

Kathy Griffin

#45. Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language.

John Henry Newman

#46. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

Raymond Chandler

#47. So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They that understand the meaning of language understand language and life better!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#48. The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.

George Edward Woodberry

#49. Neurology's favourite word is 'deficit', denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties).

Oliver Sacks

#50. Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

#51. {28:11} For with the speech of lips and with a different language, he will speak to this people. {28:12}

The Biblescript

#52. Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.

Steven Pinker

#53. Yes, writers are writing in all corners of the world. Yes they are writing in countries rich and poor. Yes, they are writing despite threats to their freedom of speech or even to their very lives. . . . everywhere on earth writers were writing in their own language.

Minae Mizumura

#54. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...

Julio Cortazar

#55. Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks.

Raymond Moody

#56. You've got to find a difierent approach. You've got to create some interest in your language, in the words and pictures you create. If a candidate can't give a 10-minute speech and have reporters reaching for their pens in the first 90 seconds, he probably shouldn't be running.

Roger Ailes

#57. All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#58. Russian is such a tough and complex language that I am happy enough to understand everything and read most things pretty well, but, without constant practice, my speech is not what I wish it was, and I would sooner write in crayon than write a letter in Russian.

David Remnick

#59. The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

John Wesley Powell

#60. Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

June Jordan

#61. I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

Amy Tan

#62. All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.

Joseph Devlin

#63. In classes, the more lively and uninhibited ones will "suck away the air" from those with a more passive nature, despite all the efforts of the teacher. It is also a special danger in large groups that you will hear your fellow students' bad pronunciation more than the teacher's perfected speech.

Kato Lomb

#64. True love was a language, so many looks, touches and one word references that told the other more than full sentences of paragraphs, more than full outpourings of speech.
Our language was extensive and beautiful, and over a joyful lifetime together, we stayed fluent in it.

R.K. Lilley

#65. Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.

Grace Paley

#66. Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not.

Edwin Newman

#67. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

John Steinbeck

#68. I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.

James Frey

#69. Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Roland Barthes

#70. First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

Peter Ellis

#71. He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence - of talking without meaning - is never effaced.

Henry Adams

#72. Cadence, n.
I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I'm talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Suthern truncation, and I know it's because I'm swimming in your cadences, that you penetrate my very language.

David Levithan

#73. Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.

Gene Wolfe

#74. If you want your style to be energetic and lively, take the most direct route and use the most energetic and lively part of speech in the English language: verbs.

Stephen Wilbers

#75. Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.

Robert G. Ingersoll

#76. The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.

John Wesley Powell

#77. Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape ... if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.

Arthur Quinn

#78. I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.

Alasdair Gray

#79. Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.
Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.
Their language has been lost.
But not the gestures.

Vera Nazarian

#80. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

#81. We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech

William Carlos Williams

#82. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go out and greet those wonderful creatures and say a few nice words in a language invented by Tolkein. I've practiced, but I sound like Chewbacca making a New Year's speech.

Nina George

#83. A handful of the senior officers listening to the speech disapproved of Patton's coarse language. Patton could not care less. He believes that profanity is the language of the soldier, and that to speak to soldiers one must use words that will have the most impact.

Bill O'Reilly

#84. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton ...

George Bernard Shaw

#85. Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.

Bela Lugosi

#86. Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?

Charlotte Bronte

#87. I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.

Antonin Artaud

#88. Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Charles Caleb Colton

#89. And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: "Our language," she said, "is not spoken, but sung ... Not simply words ... and grammar ... but melody. It was hard ... thus ... to learn English ... this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.

M T Anderson

#90. Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

Edward Hirsch

#91. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#92. They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow. The dumb have a lonely grandeur like Nature's own. Wherefore

Rabindranath Tagore

#93. Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

Roman Jakobson

#94. Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Margaret Atwood

#95. I don't like jokes in speeches. I do like wit and humor. A joke is to humor what pornography is to erotic language in a good novel.

James C. Humes