Language The Quotes

#1. It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.

Eduardo Galeano

#2. The world of sports knows no religious, racial or political differences. Athletes, from whatever land they come, speak the same language. The lessons of competition are lessons for life.

Robert Kennedy

#3. If God had so wished, he could have made all Indians speak one language ... the unity of India has been and shall always be a unity in diversity.

Rabindranath Tagore

#4. I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.

Barbara Kingsolver

#5. He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

Angela Carter

#6. PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.

Ambrose Bierce

#7. The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

Manuel Puig

#8. Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

Howard Nemerov

#9. I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?

Ellen Goodman

#10. Shit of ten horses," his twin said in the Old Language. "The new aftershave of the lessers," Phury muttered, rubbing his eyes.

J.R. Ward

#11. In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.

Octavio Paz

#12. Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.

Molly Haskell

#13. What's exciting about theatre is observing human behaviour. You're constantly making judgments about body language, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual.

Hattie Morahan

#14. Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, "inner speech," and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,

Oliver Sacks

#15. In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

George Bernard Shaw

#16. Two of the chief defenders of the faith in the Old Testament and in the New - Moses and Paul - were both well-versed in the language, the thinking, and the philosophy of their cultures.

Ravi Zacharias

#17. Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.

Anne Rice

#18. There is something very curious in semantics, that the word 'meaning' is probably, in the whole language, the word the meaning of which is the most difficult to find. What does 'to mean' mean?

Anonymous

#19. Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Mark Strand

#20. I love the Italian culture - it's a beautiful culture. I love the language, the Italian people, their music, their attitudes ... I just love it! Sometimes I think I'm an Italian trapped in a Spanish woman's body.

Penelope Cruz

#21. The only philosophy is that of language, the only religion is that of the word.

Michel Serres

#22. The least difficult thing a foreign missionary has to learn is the language; the part of her work which she has the most reason to dread is its responsibility.

Isabella Thoburn

#23. I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

Adrienne Rich

#24. Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!

Fernando J. Corbato

#25. Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

Ben Marcus

#26. My first language, the true language of the soul spoken only on our planet of origin, had no word for betrayal or traitor. Or even loyalty- because without the opposite, the concept had no meaning.

Stephenie Meyer

#27. I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#28. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

Anthony Doerr

#29. One barrier ... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.

David Perkins

#30. I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.

Marcel Proust

#31. You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

John Berryman

#32. In my judgment, most people don't have the slightest idea of what is actually written in the Old Testament because they, like Dawkins himself, cannot speak the language. The

Brent A. Strawn

#33. Under the assumption that it would attract less attention than a BIC language, the conspirators conducted telephone conversations in English--broken English, to be exact, with one tense, no articles, and two pronunciations, both wrong(129).

Vladimir Nabokov

#34. There is a pretty interesting document called 'action writing.' Which is not all about spontaneity and first thought, best thought,' but a certain kind of attention to the smallest increments of the phonemes of language, The kind of power of connection, what he is able to do with language.

Anne Waldman

#35. Chess is like a language, the top players are very fluent at it. Talent can be developed scientifically but you have to find first what you are good at.

Viswanathan Anand

#36. When I was younger, I used to hate Germany. I hated the country, the people, the language, the culture, everything! But over the years I've grown to really appreciate the German people.

Anthony Kiedis

#37. Yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood
...

John Geddes

#38. Once you embody the language, the character comes really naturally, especially when you put the costume on.

Lucy Liu

#39. The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

Terence McKenna

#40. In the ancient Indian Pali language, the words for mind and heart are the same. And the Chinese character for mindfulness is a combination of two characters. One part means now and the other means mind or heart. So, when you hear the word mindfulness you can also consider it to mean heartfulness.

Shamash Alidina

#41. Sit down, have a nice cup of coffee read a book in another language - the fountain of youth!

Stephen D. Krashen

#42. the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things.

Michael Chabon

#43. You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

Neil Postman

#44. Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.

Michel De Montaigne

#45. The German language is so sonorous, isn't it? Beautiful language ... the language of poetry. Angry, angry poetry.

John Oliver

#46. Language the most forcible proceeds from the man who is most sincere. The way to speak with power, or to write words that pierce mankind to the quick, is to speak and write honestly.

Elias Lyman Magoon

#47. At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

Walter Kirn

#48. The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

William Carlos Williams

#49. The poem has to bear the weight with image, language ... the screenplay with dialogue, plot ...

Julianna Baggott

#50. By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

Octavio Paz

#51. The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

Hugo Ball

#52. In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.

Stephen Burt

#53. Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you.

Dane Rudhyar

#54. The body is a very low level machine language. The language of the soul, of the mind, is much more evolved.

Frederick Lenz

#55. In the Old Peculiar language, the word ymbryne (pronounced imm-brinn) means "revolution" or "circuit.

Ransom Riggs

#56. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.

Virginia Woolf

#57. As the chant grew in volume she began to be conscious of the terrible potency of language, the sense that a name spoken is a summons and more than a summons, an act of creation, for a word shapes an idea, an idea shapes belief, and belief shapes the world.

Jan Siegel

#58. Would have. Could have. Should have. This is the language of condemnation underscored by the passivity of regret. It's a dead language. The thing is, you can't un-sin. You can only repent.

Steven Furtick

#59. The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the below things. They are the ones who gave us one of the most beautiful words in our language, the word enthusiasm.

Louis Pasteur

#60. Words slip into a language the way white-green vines slide between slats in a fence.

Tim Seibles

#61. Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate

Richard Flanagan

#62. I've been working a lot with identity and roots, being part of your roots. I went into this topic where I was trying to break the stereotype of Arabic language. The non-translation work, this is where I make the switch, where you don't need to translate.

EL Seed

#63. We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.

Terence McKenna

#64. If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.

M. Scott Peck

#65. Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

Robert Fitzgerald

#66. So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Thomas Lynch

#67. The only language the ignorant comprehend is "silence.

Bahman Solati

#68. Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#69. The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.

Anton Chekhov

#70. No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

Tim O'Brien

#71. I have no leisure to think of style or of polish, or to select the best language, the best English - no time to shine as an authoress. I must just think aloud, so as not to keep the public waiting.

Isabel Burton

#72. I spoke the language the sentences that had lied their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the worlds first concentration camps.

Bryce Courtenay

#73. If Japanese companies don't reform drastically and implement English as their daily business language, the economy will only continue to contract.

Shuji Nakamura

#74. For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

Julian Jaynes

#75. Records have never really been my strong suit. I've always been a much better live act. I didn't understand the language of the studio. You sing differently in a studio. The language, the craft - it's just a whole different deal. I avoided the problem on my first record by doing a live album.

Jewel

#76. Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is 'not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.' That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House.

Jesse Jackson

#77. Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.

Harrison Ford

#78. The heart has its own language. The heart knows a hundred thousand ways to speak.

Rumi

#79. We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

George Carlin

#80. They call our language the mother tongue because the father seldom gets to speak.

George W. Bush

#81. Such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.

Henry David Thoreau

#82. Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.

Paul Gauguin

#83. I loved England's gentility and its civility. I'm from the Bronx, with a Bronx accent. I love the beauty of its language, the ways it's spoken. I love the green grass of England and the flowers.

Sid Bernstein

#84. 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

#85. When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies.

Jean-Jacques Annaud

#86. Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall
discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied.

Ann Voskamp

#87. An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

Istvan Deak

#88. ...unfortunately, I am incapable of thinking up perfectly biting, split-second retorts, in any language. The French even have a word for this: l'esprit de l'escalier; staircase wit, something you only think of on the way out.

Tania Aebi

#89. To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Gaston Bachelard

#90. Kindness is a language the dumb can speak and the deaf can hear and understand.

C.N. Bovee

#91. Who is considered as reputable in God's language? The one who can do 'world's salvation' just through his eyes!

Dada Bhagwan

#92. The careful choice of words, the scrubbing of language, the calculated images we presented to the external audiences - those were all major parts of my daily life over there. So, some of that is going to seep over into what I showed in the novel and - more importantly - how I showed it.

Dave Abrams

#93. It's my language, the language I speak. I've spent a lot more time playing music than talking or writing.

Nitin Sawhney

#94. Ojiisan says if you want to understand a people, look at their language. The words write the history, not the other way around.

Leza Lowitz

#95. I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.

Donald E. Westlake

#96. The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.

Kurt Godel

#97. 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

#98. There is only one caste ... the caste of humanity. There is only one religion ... the religion of love. There is only one language ... the language of the heart.

Sathya Sai Baba

#99. The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.

Jorge Amado

#100. It's amazing to be able to work with people right at the top of whatever they do ... inspiring photographers and stylists with very interesting visual language. The more I do it, the more I enjoy it.

Edie Campbell