Top 100 Language Is Quotes
#1. In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.
Mary Louise Pratt
#2. Directing non-actors is difficult. Directing actors in a foreign language is even more difficult. Directing non-actors in a language that you yourself don't understand is the craziest thing you can possibly think of.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#3. This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently have ensured the invisibility or 'other' nature of females ...
Dale Spender
#4. Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#5. 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
#6. My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.
David Bohm
#7. What is music? Music is language. A human being wants to express ideas in this language, but not ideas that can be translated into concepts ...
Anton Webern
#8. And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said.
Michael Chabon
#9. The human face is the organic seat of beauty. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.
Eliza Farnham
#10. 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
#11. My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
Anthony Doerr
#12. The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.
Jack London
#13. Translation is a two-edged instrument: it has the special purpose of demonstrating the learner's knowledge of the foreign language, either as a form of control or to exercise his intelligence in order to develop his competence.
Peter Newmark
#14. The theater is a kind of international language, and I like it. But I have a practical bent of mind, too. In any other field, I could make only about a tenth as much as I do acting. That's why I want to be a producer. It pays better, and you have more control.
Carolyn Jones
#15. 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
#16. Language overlaps with culture but is not subsumed by it
John McWhorter
#17. I'm happy with my language progress - the only difficulty when I tour Premier League matches is that different people talk to me in different accents - and sometimes I can hardly understand a word!
Fabio Capello
#18. I hate that word, CAN'T. I wish it had never been dreamed
up, spoken, or defined. I wish the concept of CAN'T could be
eradicated not only from language, but more importantly from
the psyche of a girl who I know is filled with so much CAN it seeps out of her pores and scents the air.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#19. Nature alone can speak to our intelligence an imperishable language, never changing, because it remains within the bounds of eternal truth and of what is absolutely noble and beautiful.
George Sand
#20. In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#21. English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.
Paul Scott
#22. True confession: The reason we don't talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.
Jodi Picoult
#23. I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.
Edward Hirsch
#24. To me, music is entertainment - what else can it be? In fact, it's the only language I know of that's universal.
Ray Charles
#25. The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing.
Roger Babson
#26. Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#27. What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.
Steven Pinker
#28. Music is a second language to my heart.
Mara Arps
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Bill Bryson
#32. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
Confucius
#33. What distinguishes the language of science from language as we ordinarily understand the word? ... What science strives for is an utmost acuteness and clarity of concepts as regards their mutual relation and their correspondence to sensory data.
Albert Einstein
#34. When the heart speaks, its language is the same under all latitudes.
Ella Maillart
#35. There's a whole language out there, and one's role as a writer is to stumble around in it.
Ciaran Carson
#36. [Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.
Aristophanes
#37. Music is a language that speaks to people emotions.
The Unknown
#38. 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
#39. Evidently there is difficulty, real difficulty, in learning a foreign language at all, as if it sprinkled all the sweet flavor of the Greek mythical stories with a foul taste.
Augustine Of Hippo
#40. The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.
Italo Calvino
#41. What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.
Sarah Dunant
#42. But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
Wislawa Szymborska
#43. 'Ulysses' is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic.
Tom Paulin
#44. Would you look at that body language? Legs crossed towards each other. That is an unequivocal sex invite.
Cher
#45. Music is a language - and language, at its finest, should be music.
T.L. Rese
#46. JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language.
Douglas Crockford
#47. Happiness is the most tired word in any language.
Erol Ozan
#48. Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
Charles Scribner Jr.
#49. 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
#50. One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
Denise Levertov
#51. Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.
J.K. Rowling
#52. I think photography is a universal language as far as storytelling goes, and I think that's what it's most successful at.
Mary Mattingly
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.
Yann Martel
#56. Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
Ambrose Bierce
#57. Unintelligible language is a lantern without a light.
Samuel Johnson
#58. 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
#59. Unless Russia is face with an iron fist and strong language, another is in the making. Only one language do they understand - 'How many divisions have you?' ... I'm tired of babying the Soviets.
Harry S. Truman
#60. In love's country, language doesn't have its place. Love is mute.
Rumi
#61. I suggest that the emergence of descriptive language is at the root of the human power of imagination, of human inventiveness, and therefore the emergence of world 3.
Karl R. Popper
#62. Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you, said the young man mildly, from the smoke.
Neil Gaiman
#63. The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.
Woodrow Wilson
#64. Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
Karl Popper
#65. Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations.
Peter L. Berger
#66. It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.
Uta Hagen
#67. The more people that learn sign language, the better. This is part of my life, but it's not part of everybody's life, so it's nice to expose this to the world.
Sean Berdy
#68. Actors always start with the voice and language. That's wrong. They should start with the body. The body is an actor's most important resource.
Robert Wilson
#69. I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
#70. A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#71. A dance performance is rather like going out into a battlefield. You have to hold the attention of as many as five to 10,000 people a lot of whom do not follow your language.
Yamini Krishnamurthy
#72. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
Alan Perlis
#73. This modern interpretation of Machiavelli's landmark work is perhaps more useful for the modern reader than the original text. His dense ideas have been boiled down to their essence and presented in language that can be easily grasped by the modern mind.
Brandon Musk
#74. You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.
Marina Abramovic
#75. 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
#76. English is not my first language.
Zhu Zhu
#77. A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.
Joshua Cohen
#78. Ian snorted. "My language is the least of your concerns, Reaper." True, but . . . "Everyone has to start somewhere, Ian.
Jeaniene Frost
#79. What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.
George Herbert Mead
#80. Poetry has its own unique language which every mind translates differently according to their own personal view.
Debasish Mridha
#81. It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.
Noam Chomsky
#83. Music is the language of the universe, which everyone, including all animals, can understand.
Debasish Mridha
#84. If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
Louise Erdrich
#85. What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!
Pete La Roca
#86. Force is the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without some sort of violence.
Nelson Mandela
#87. I grew up a really nerdy kid. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously, for the first 16 years of my life. I read a lot of classic Cold War science fiction, which is much of the best science fiction, so I speak the language well, which is a commodity that's not easy to come by in Hollywood.
Jon Spaihts
#88. Love and attraction is the magmatic language of the heart.
Debasish Mridha
#89. We can think of descriptions almost as computer languages, an operative description that only deals with very simple operations. Its code is sex - Male, female, dark, light, up down, in out - its the language of duality.
Frederick Lenz
#90. A healthy self and an empty self are not contradictory; it just appears so because we use the same language to describe two different things. The whole path of meditation is about understanding that the self as an unchanging entity is a fiction, an illusory mental construct.
Joseph Goldstein
#91. Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.
Anne Carson
#93. Kindness is a language more often misunderstood than taken at face value.
Joyce Rachelle
#94. The language in which thought is embodied is the mere carcass of the thought, and not the idea itself; tribunals may condemn the form, but the sense and spirit of the work is too subtle for their authority.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#95. My work is my language and I don't discuss it very easily. It's difficult for me to verbalize my feelings, or to intellectualize my work. In fact, it used to annoy me when Ansel Adams and Paul Strand yak-yak-yakked about what photography meant, and I told them so.
Brett Weston
#96. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#97. Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time,
Charles James
#98. The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.
Charles Murray
#99. My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google.
Ray Kurzweil
#100. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
