Top 100 Language Are Quotes
#1. I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.
Chelsea Clinton
#2. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
Oscar Wilde
#3. Opinions of language are as interesting as opinions of arithmetic.
P. J. O'Rourke
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.
William Zinsser
#7. 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
#8. Compassion is for the very strong. Compassion does not come to the weak. People who are unkind, bullies, use rude language, are not strong people. They are very weak people.
Harbhajan Singh Yogi
#9. Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access.
Carol Windley
#10. Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.
Robert Lane Greene
#11. 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
#12. All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
Roland Barthes
#13. The four most important words in the English language are, "What do you think?" Listen to your people and learn.
J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr.
#14. The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.
Joyce Carol Oates
#15. Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.
Kenneth Branagh
#16. Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?
Henry Ward Beecher
#17. The four most expensive words in the English language are, 'This time it's different.'
John Templeton
#18. In other words, all the highest aims of language are decisively the work
of God. They are decisively supernatural. And no amount of poetic
effort or expertise in the use of words can bring about the great aims
of life if God withholds his saving power.
John Piper
#19. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.
J.K. Rowling
#20. Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.
Charlton Laird
#21. The three most dreaded words in the English language are 'negative cash flow'.
David Tang
#22. Perhaps, after all, the most beautiful words in the language are I'm sorry.
Christopher Buckley
#23. Person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?" The complexities of the English language are
Bill Bryson
#24. The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#25. To rob, to ravage, to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace.
[Lat., Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.]
Tacitus
#26. We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.
Steven Pinker
#27. Some of the most healing words in any language are, "I'm sorry. Will you forgive me?" How much more we need that confession to our Father in heaven.
Billy Graham
#28. But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.
Guy Deutscher
#29. The Hebrew Bible has long been the world's possession, and those who come to it by any means, through whatever language, are equals in ownership, and may not be denied the intimacy of their spiritual claim.
Cynthia Ozick
#30. My favorite three words in the English language are: 'I don't know', because every time I say them, I learn something new.
Timothy Leary
#31. Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: "The King is dead" and "Jesus wept."
Bill Moyers
#32. The most beautiful words in the English language are not 'I love you', but 'It's benign'.
Woody Allen
#33. Net neutrality: The only two words that promise more boredom in the English language are 'featuring Sting,'
John Oliver
#34. The most self-damaging words in the English language are: try, might, and if. These are words of uncertainty. Will you fail? That is possible. But continue doubting your abilities and you'll never succeed.
Dannika Dark
#35. Most children are given far too much praise for their early drawings, so much so that they rarely learn the ability to refine their first crude efforts the way their early attempts at language are corrected.
Charles De Lint
#36. The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.
Will Ferguson
#38. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
#39. The great arbiters of language are the women who speak it in the presence of children ... What the women pass on to the next generation is "right" and what they do not bother to pass on to their children sooner or later becomes "wrong.
Charlton Laird
#40. What language are you talking in now? It appears to be bollocks.
Richard Wilson
#41. The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.
Erez Lieberman Aiden
#42. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money. (64)
Mary Doria Russell
#43. The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same.
Marjane Satrapi
#44. Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.
William, Saroyan
#45. The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.
Dorothy Parker
#46. Some changes of language are to be regretted, as they lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things.
James F. Cooper
#47. One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
Francis Crick
#48. Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.
Mary Doria Russell
#49. It has long been said that the three hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don't know.
Steven D. Levitt
#50. Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#51. Without a doubt the two best words in the English language are The End
Ken Scott
#52. Requirements in mathematical language are no use unless they are easier to read than the code.
David Parnas
#54. All human efforts to communicate - even in the same language - are equally utopian, equally luminous with value, and equally worth the doing.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#55. Initially, before I came to Hollywood, I thought that the language barrier would be the biggest challenge, but I realized that actors all around the world, regardless of language, are all the same.
Kim Jee-woon
#56. The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?
Robert Motherwell
#58. The two most beautiful words in any language are : I forgive.
Stephen King
#59. Let others choose the sons of mirth, To give a relish to their wine; I love the men of heavenly birth, Whose thoughts and language are divine.18
Douglas Bond
#60. Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
#61. The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
James F. Cooper
#62. We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you're an ass.
Alena Graedon
#63. The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.
Bill Bryson
#64. The ten most powerful two-letter words in the English language are: If it is to be, it is up to me.
Harvey MacKay
#65. 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
#66. [...] 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Tears are our first language and our last.
Marty Rubin
#99. 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
#100. 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
