Language Are Quotes

#1. To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.

C.S. Lewis

#2. [...] it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them [...]

Jose Saramago

#3. Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

Gilbert Highet

#4. Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Octavio Paz

#5. The primary needs can be filled without language. We can eat, sleep, make love, build a house, bear children, without language. But we cannot ask questions. We cannot ask, 'Who am I? Who are you? Why?

Madeleine L'Engle

#6. It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

Steven Pinker

#8. We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language ... We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.

Lewis Thomas

#9. I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.

Chelsea Clinton

#10. 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

#11. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.

Slavoj Zizek

#12. My fans are all pretty cool, you know; I've never really seen anybody fighting on Twitter, no death threats, no harsh language, no gay slurs, nothing like that.

Drake Bell

#13. Painting is ... a richer language than words ... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.

Jean Dubuffet

#14. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

David Plotz

#15. That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people. I

Trevor Noah

#16. Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Erich Fromm

#17. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.

John Ruskin

#18. It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest ...

Jan Morris

#19. There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language," she said. "That's one of the reasons that we have poetry.

Ava Dellaira

#20. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

Henry David Thoreau

#21. If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

#22. You are concerned citizens." He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where "traditional values" meant "hang someone." He did not have a problem with this, broadly speaking, but it never hurt to understand your employer.

Terry Pratchett

#23. We are never half so interesting when we have learned that language is given us to enable us to conceal our thoughts.

L.M. Montgomery

#24. The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.

Paulo Freire

#25. Language itself is a cultural convention, and since the Bible and other ancient documents use language to communicate, they are bound to a culture.

John H. Walton

#26. Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.

Robert Herrick

#27. That's what music did. It made you feel.
...
Music, her grandfather always told her, was language. A special language, a gift from the Muses, something all people are born understanding but few people can thoroughly translate.

Sara Zarr

#28. Isn't language amazing? I can't get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and its like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don't know if its disgusting or beautiful.

Victor Lodato

#29. Look, we have existed for 4,000 years - 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.

Shimon Peres

#30. If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated.

Denise Riley

#31. Touch is the most basic, the most nonconceptual form of communication that we have. In touch there are no language barriers; anything that can walk, fly, creep, crawl, or swim already speaks it.

Ina May Gaskin

#32. Chemical compounds of carbon can exist in an infinite variety of compositions, forms and sizes. The naturally occurring organic substances are the basis of all life on Earth, and their science at the molecular level defines a fundamental language of that life.

Elias James Corey

#33. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#34. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

Oscar Wilde

#35. How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint.

Henry David Thoreau

#36. Tears are our first language and our last.

Marty Rubin

#37. I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.

Claudia Rankine

#38. Opinions of language are as interesting as opinions of arithmetic.

P. J. O'Rourke

#39. There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.

John Hay

#40. There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.

David Whyte

#41. If you don't care about the lapel or the buttons or the fit, then you are doing a disservice to the consumer. We're all inside the tunnel, speaking the language of business, but we need to speak the language of customers.

Mickey Drexler

#42. 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

#43. There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind

Noam Chomsky

#44. Everything starts to break down, however, when a species gains language. What we talk about isn't what we experience - we speak chiefly of interesting things, and those tend to be things that are uncommon.

Brian Christian

#45. Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

Patrick Rothfuss

#46. There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

Patrice Nganang

#47. To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.

Dean Kamen

#48. I am demonstrating to you how tasty I think words are. I'm having sex with words in front of you. I'm playing around with them. I'm getting off. I'm trying to titillate you. There's this magical substance, language, that I'm laying out for you. Then you're going to fondle it.

Wayne Koestenbaum

#49. If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.

Mary Norris

#50. A satyagrahi is sometimes bound to use language which is capable of two meanings, provided both the meanings are obvious and necessary and there is no intention to deceive anyone.

Mahatma Gandhi

#51. So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.

Edward Sapir

#52. Two of the saddest words in the English language are, 'What party?' And L.A. is the 'What party?' capital of the world.

Carrie Fisher

#53. Foreign-language books are sometimes more beautiful when you can't tell what's being said. It's like you ruin it by reading.

Craig Thompson

#54. In my youth I regarded the Universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which, in our rare moments of grace, we are able to decipher a small fragment.

Arthur Koestler

#55. Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.

David Kyuman Kim

#56. In every language, labels for adulterous women are far worse than those for similarly adventurous men. When a woman is a "a slut," a man is merely a skirt chaser.

Frans De Waal

#57. Confidence is not posting endless selfies, or repeatedly protesting how happy or in love we are, it's a subtle yet noticeable sheen that emanates from our being - our eyes, our words, our body language.

Sam Owen

#58. Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.

William Zinsser

#59. We are Americans, speaking the same language, adopting the same customs, holding the same general opinions ... and shall rise and fall with Americans.

Frederick Douglass

#60. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

P.D. James

#61. We are facing an external attack against us, which is more dangerous than any other previous wars ... We are dealing with those who are extremists, who only know the language of killing and criminality.

Bashar Al-Assad

#62. There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.

Patricia A. McKillip

#63. To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of "languages," styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#64. Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?

John Mortimer

#65. Here you are, obsessed with romantic language-a language invented for expression between lovers-and you use it to spread animosity.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

#66. Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem.

Daniel Everett

#67. I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?

Rene Denfeld

#68. There are Latino people in our world who believe strongly that if you are Latino you should speak the language, you should eat the food, you should listen to the music, you should be proud. And when you don't do those things, some people will look at it as if you're neglecting who you are.

Selenis Leyva

#69. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.

Simon Armitage

#70. There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.

Victor Pelevin

#71. Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden
a secret language.

Robert Altman

#72. We are creatures built on a house of cards of language.

Stefan Molyneux

#73. It has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state. These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.

Chris Hedges

#74. Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.

Henry Sweet

#75. The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.

Flemming Rose

#76. The fans are bad everywhere you go, with language, and with behavior. You can't put enough cops in the stands, but you ought to give the cops cameras, give people cameras, so they can take a picture of the idiot and you can identify him.

John Chaney

#77. I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.

S.I. Hayakawa

#78. Stories are the reproductive organs of language.

Robert Bringhurst

#79. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

Terence McKenna

#80. What the eye sees is a synthesis of who you are and all you have learned. This is what I would call the language of photography.

Graciela Iturbide

#81. being articulate is not a facility of language but a fidelity to vision. And so we are all articulate when finding the courage to say what we see.

Mark Nepo

#82. Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.

Santino Hassell

#83. I have seen how effective language attached to policies that are mainstream and delivered by people who are passionate and effective can change the course of history.

Frank Luntz

#84. That old adage, that "music is a universal language", is really true. Even if all of the lyrics are understood, they seem to connect with it really well and in some ways, more so.

William Fitzsimmons

#85. My task as a language arts teacher is to provide texts that are not so difficult that my students shut down in frustration and not so easy that my students don't push their thinking.

Kimberly Hill Campbell

#86. The film [Boy and the World]gave me the possibility to create a new language. Animation is a very rich medium but hasn't fully been exploited by artists. Often artists are trapped by words.

Alex Abreu

#87. ...it is not news that we live in a world
Where beauty is unexplainable
And suddenly ruined
And has its own routines. We are often far
From home in a dark town, and our griefs
Are difficult to translate into a language
Understood by others.

Charlie Smith

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

Grace Paley

#89. Comedy is a universal language. I grew up watching Nagesh, Surilirajan, Thenga Srinivasan and S.V. Shekhar's comedies. And, of course, Charlie Chaplin! These artists are so blessed: they can make other people happy.

A.R. Rahman

#90. To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

Rebecca Solnit

#91. Don't you find it odd that two of the foremost symptoms of insanity are the hearing voices and talking to oneself? Is it any wonder that language is an area of such interest in psychology?
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

Mort W. Lumsden

#92. I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.

Will Oldham

#93. Language change is not a disease, any more than adolescence, or autumn are illnesses.

Jean Aitchison

#94. FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

Ken Thompson

#95. All too often, when people don't know where they are, have jet lag, don't speak the language, and can't figure out the money or maintain intestinal regularity, they get hostile.

Mary-Lou Weisman

#96. The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

Marilyn Hacker

#97. All love songs, no matter how eloquent or crude, ornamented or plain, in whatever language they are sung, say essentially the same thing. All love stories have but one meaning.

Lee Siegel

#98. Even if you're a genius and you invent your own language, it doesn't become a language until there are people using it.

Eyvind Kang

#99. It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.

Andrew Dalby

#100. 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