Top 100 Language Not Quotes
#1. The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.
Minae Mizumura
#2. Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.
Massimo Vignelli
#3. I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself.
Gabor Mate
#4. Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.
Richard Rodriguez
#5. The Christian worldview, contra-postmodernism, understands language not as a Self-referential, merely human and ultimately arbitrary system of signs that is reducible to contingent cultural factors, but it has the gift of a rational God entrusted to beings made in his own image and likeness.
Douglas Groothuis
#6. But Longinus and his intellectual descendants had been concerned with the Sublime as a literary effect: how language, not landscape, could be lofty, grand or inspiring.
Robert Macfarlane
#7. Handling and use by able minds give value to a language, not so much by innovating as by filling it out with more vigorous and varied services, by stretching and bending it.
Michel De Montaigne
#8. I can use movie as a language. Not only could it send a good message, I could let people know about my thinking and how I see the world, how I see the colour, how I see the music, how I see everything.
John Woo
#9. Love ... requires that you learn to read the lover in her own language, not translate her into yours.
Steven Heighton
#10. The United States Navy, during the war, used Navajos as "code-talkers" who relayed messages from ship to ship, talking in Navajo (a language not studied in Japan).
Michael Lesk
#11. I am only describing language, not explaining anything.
Joseph Kosuth
#12. When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others
using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.
Charlotte Lamb
#13. We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.
Eric Hoffer
#14. Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas
Langston Hughes
#15. The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.
Jimmy Wales
#16. Reality cannot be captured by language - not even the language of mathematics - since all language, by its very nature, is man-made, self-referent ambiguity.
Dee Hock
#17. Does inadequacy not characterize all that we make use of to perceive and describe the world? Are the signs of language not just as inadequate, albeit differently, as are images?
Georges Didi-Huberman
#18. ... the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element ...
Derek Walcott
#19. This is the difficulty with learning a language: not always knowing if words contain more than they say.
Joan Barfoot
#20. The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing.
Frans De Waal
#21. Ooo ahe-e, I aya oa a, she said in yawnspeak, a language - not unlike Hawaiian - known for its paucity of consonants.
Christopher Moore
#22. A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.
Nelson Shanks
#23. Young'uns!" Mrs. P. interrupted. "No bad language, not at the table, please. And need I remind you, I am the table!
Kathryn Lasky
#25. 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
#26. No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on "the given." Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.
Thomas S. Kuhn
#27. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.
Sebastiao Salgado
#28. Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.
Oliver Sacks
#29. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.
Paul Auster
#30. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me."
As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
Maggie Nelson
#31. 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
#32. Language overlaps with culture but is not subsumed by it
John McWhorter
#33. Investigations "eliminated solipsism but not the horror." The only difference between this new predicament and that of the Tractatus was that rather than being trapped alone in our private thoughts, we were trapped together, with other people, in the institution of language.
James Ryerson
#34. 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
#35. Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person's eyes.
Oliver Sacks
#36. To use strong language, she thought, was a sign of bad temper and lack of concern for others. Such people were not clever or bold simply because they used such language; each time they opened their mouths they proclaimed I am a person who is poor in words.
Alexander McCall Smith
#37. I've done two remakes, 'Rowdy Rathore' and 'Son of Sardaar,' and I see nothing wrong with it. The originals were in a language that not everyone understands, so when you're making it in another language, you can reach a much wider audience. That's how I look at it.
Sonakshi Sinha
#38. Eleanor had followed Richard, marveling, as always, at the male inability to speak the language of the heart. "One day I hope to understand why men see sentiment as the ultimate enemy," she said dryly, "but I'll not be holding my breath until it happens.
Sharon Kay Penman
#39. Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?
If it were not for language, could we lie?
Joyce Carol Oates
#40. I went back to look for you.
Not understanding the language of hello,
I thought I'd speak it just the same.
Rod McKuen
#41. 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
#42. ...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
#43. Tengo realized this was the first time he had ever heard anything resembling polite language from Fuka-Eri's mouth. No, it might not have been the first time, but he could not recall when he might have heard it before.
Haruki Murakami
#44. 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
#45. English should not stoop to embrace the lowest common denominator. Rather, society should step up and grant the language the respect it deserves.
Terry Fallis
#46. 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
#47. Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me.
Jeff Lindsay
#48. Photography has fooled the world. There's no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.
Edmundo Desnoes
#49. 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
#50. All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.
E.L. Doctorow
#51. Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
Edmund Morgan
#52. 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
#53. English is not my first language.
Zhu Zhu
#54. What is so exquisite is that not a word has been said by me or by her, but we understand each other so well in this unseen language of looks and tones that this evening more clearly than ever she told me she loves me.
Leo Tolstoy
#55. I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
Ezra Pound
#56. Life is not all high emotion. Some of the most interesting things are when its not highly emotional: little details of relationships and body language.
David Attenborough
#57. So they had language, and they had fire, and they had society. And about then she found an adjustment being made in her mind, as the word creatures became the word people. These beings weren't human, but they were people, she told herself; it's not them, they're us. They
Philip Pullman
#58. 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
#59. A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.
Victor Hugo
#60. Wickedness arrays itself in fair garments, and imitates the language of holiness; but the precepts of Jesus, like His famous scourge of small cords, chase it out of the temple, and will not tolerate it in the Church.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#61. The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.
Richard M. Nixon
#62. I had a dream about you last night... we tried to joke but neither could make any sense. We realized that puns are present in every language, though not shared by any of them.
Marshall Ramsay
#63. Every writer, by the way he uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias ... Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.
William Strunk Jr.
#64. The instrumental pieces are compositions, certainly, although that's not the language that I instinctively use. They're not scored, and arrangements are often arrived at collaboratively. I always choose to play with people whose input I desire.
David Grubbs
#65. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
Virginia Woolf
#66. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
John Donne
#67. 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
#68. Art is a language. It's not a skill. It's not a stunt. It's not something that you just learn to do and put it down. It comes from the heart.
Wynona Mulcaster
#69. If we believe God is present in our worship as He promises to be,20 then we must frame all language of worship as to Him and not merely about Him.
James MacDonald
#70. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal
#71. Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
W. H. Auden
#72. The standard "foundation" for mathematics starts with sets and their elements. It is possible to start differently, by axiomatising not elements of sets but functions between sets. This can be done by using the language of categories and universal constructions.
Saunders Mac Lane
#73. The language of love is the only language understood but not spoken the world over.
Amit Abraham
#74. I do not so easily think in words ... after being hard at work having arrived at results that are perfectly clear ... I have to translate my thoughts in a language that does not run evenly with them.
Francis Galton
#75. Understanding that these statements do not represent reality, we should not be threatened by the language that he has used.
Mohammad Javad Zarif
#76. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#77. I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.
Steven Pinker
#78. His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.
Richard Mitchell
#79. The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that?
Instead, she said, "I love you." She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.
Ann Hood
#80. The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes "separation of good from evil;" it establishes unquestionable
Herbert Marcuse
#81. Because of language, the thoughts we record today might reach into the future to influence the thinking of people not yet born.
Laura A. Freberg
#82. The words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language ... those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.
Donald Miller
#83. The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.
Dan Simmons
#84. The most advanced minds as well as the least advanced are obliged to use the same words. If we adopt new words, it will be even more difficult - if not impossible - to make ourselves understood. The new man must therefore express himself in conventional language.
Piet Mondrian
#85. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.
Gerry Abbey
#86. Toska." He leaned forward, too. "It's a Russian word. It has no translation into any other language, but the closest I've heard is the ache. A longing. The sense that something is missing, and even if you're not sure what it is, you ache for it. Down to your bones.
Maggie Hall
#87. If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.
James Joyce
#88. By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#89. What I value in books is lucidity. I want the language to be rich; I love lexical fireworks on the page, but I have to know what it means. I want to be surprised and delighted, not merely baffled.
Mal Peet
#90. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.
Steven Pinker
#91. I have been challenged with the fictional languages I have to learn. I wasn't terrible at languages at school - I got an A in French, so I did well enough - but I didn't enjoy them. I'm not even sure if that plays into how well you learn a fictional language!
Nathalie Emmanuel
#92. 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
#93. Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu.
Andrei Codrescu
#94. History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#95. Shakespeare's language does not require a British accent. It requires a facility with language, and that's all.
Joss Whedon
#96. Archaeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years.
Marija Gimbutas
#97. Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
Ben Jonson
#98. The choosing among words is made by every user of the language, and not exclusively by professional speakers and writers.
Wilson Follett
#99. On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film.
Sam Shepard
#100. I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.
Ian Smith
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