Top 100 Language The 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. PUBLISHER'S NOTE To seize the knowledge of the UNKNOWABLE needs a language, which is at once symbolically creative, revealingly poetic, infinitely plastic, luminously rhythmic, automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable descent of truth of idea, word and action.
Maa Krishna Sri Aurobindo
#3. The gods speak to us, and irony is their language.
Tim W. Burke
#4. He no longer heard Kellhus speak so much as observed him cut and carve, whittle and hew, as though the man had somehow shattered the glass of language and fashioned knives from the pieces.
R. Scott Bakker
#5. I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.
Richard Dawkins
#6. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
Billy Collins
#7. Does 'submissive' mean 'baby' in your language, Master Mason? Because I'll have you know
...
No, but Dominant does mean lover, caretaker, disciplinarian, and whatever else the situation warrants.
Bianca Sommerland
#8. I prefer perfumery, it's the language of love.
Jan Moran
#9. 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
#10. When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don't normally use hi-falutin' language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus.
Philipp Meyer
#11. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.
Edwin Gaustad
#12. 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
#13. [...] 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
#14. I had never really done voice-over. If you've ever seen me, I'm more the communicator through body language and movement ... I'm a physical actor.
Daniel Logan
#15. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt?
Sherman Alexie
#16. 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
#17. We learn the language of prayer by immersing ourselves in the language that God uses to reveal Himself to us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#18. 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
#19. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.
Sebastiao Salgado
#20. I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
Dennis Lehane
#21. I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.
Ciaran Carson
#22. I wasn't saying you were heartbroken." I sound like English is a new language for me, the way I stutter out the words. "I just meant it was hard for me to ... to watch."
He neither confirms nor denies that he might or might not have been even a teeny bit heartbroken.
Susan Ee
#23. Black-on black crime' is jargon, violence on language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don't ask, don't tell, stay civil.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I dislike math, yet I respect and appreciate the fact that math is the language of the universe.
Lucas Grabeel
#32. 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
#33. I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.
Chelsea Clinton
#34. 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
#35. To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.
Eero Saarinen
#36. Our language is rich with implication, so it is easier for us to accept the existence of things that cannot be explained. The Lethani is the greatest of these.
Patrick Rothfuss
#37. The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.
Mary McCarthy
#38. Don't speak to them in the language of the dead, Mr. Marinville.
Stephen King
#39. Man can think of divine things only in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language.
Swami Vivekananda
#40. You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?
Theresa May
#41. The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.
Antonio Machado
#42. On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
Andrew Dalby
#43. Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#44. 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
#45. The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.
Simon Van Booy
#46. When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.
Akshay Vasu
#47. Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J.G. Ballard
#48. I believe terrorism cannot be won over by military action. Terrorism must be condemned in the strongest language. We must stand solidly against it, and find all the means to end it. We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time to come.
Muhammad Yunus
#49. The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
Steven Pinker
#52. 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
#53. In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.
Roman Jakobson
#54. It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.
Max Barry
#55. My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.
Corin Tucker
#56. 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
#57. If you go to France, you have to speakFrench. If you speak in English, no one looks at you. On the one hand we sayEnglish is a global language.
Raj Thackeray
#58. Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books.
Samuel Johnson
#59. Gods were preserved but languages were exterminated: thus was the conqueror's will
Belcampo
#60. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.
Stan D. Jensen
#61. I am learning the Language of World and everything in the world is beginning to make sense to me
Paulo Coelho
#62. I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much ... so, so much.
Jacqueline Woodson
#63. Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.
Anne Rice
#64. And it occurred to me, standing there, just breathing with her, quiet settling around us, that those might be the three most beautiful words in the English language. We have time.
Ransom Riggs
#65. 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
#66. Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.
Edward R. Murrow
#67. The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.
George Steiner
#68. 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
#69. On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.
Phil Collins
#70. It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.
Mark Twain
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.
Jack London
#77. At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.
Don DeLillo
#78. Baseball. If there's a more beautiful word in the English language. I have yet to hear it ... baseball has served as such a powerful link between Dad and me, and later between me and my son.
Tim Russert
#79. To abandon language is to stop/creating a place other than your own life/in which to live. It is to enter/the terrible certainty of the flesh. Even god/is only possible through language.
Jude Nutter
#80. I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
Hilary Mantel
#81. The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors.
Alain De Botton
#82. 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
#83. I could write pages and pages about the delights of being a full-time housewife and mother and trying to write and support a family with two babies - but I don't use that kind of language in public.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#84. If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#85. She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing "yes" in the sky.
Monique Duval
#86. 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
#87. Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don't speak English?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#88. Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.
Holly Near
#89. Personally I like going places where I don't speak the language, don't know anybody, don't know my way around and don't have any delusions that I'm in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.
Michael Mewshaw
#90. 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
#91. Go learn the language. Go take some acting lessons. Start from zero like everybody else.
Roselyn Sanchez
#92. I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet.That may be. But I think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vaccuum cleaners.
Jeff Stilson
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future.
Christian Morgenstern
#96. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.
Alan Siegel
#97. No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.
Theodore Bikel
#98. And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons.
Andrew Solomon
#99. I never liked the language of Henry Miller. I don't think pornography has added to our sensual life.
Anais Nin
#100. Love and attraction is the magnetic language of the heart.
Debasish Mridha
