Top 100 Language They Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. That's what they do, psychopaths. They figure out your language, your currency, your needs, your dreams and fears. Then they figure out how to use those things to get what they want from you. Most
Lisa Unger
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.
Rick Perlstein
#12. 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
#13. I try to always motivate young kids who want to be singers or actors or whatever it is they want to be that anything is possible with hard work. It doesn't matter where you're from or what language you speak - as long as you work hard, you can achieve those goals.
Prince Royce
#14. Too much comedy is filthy these days. There's nothing they won't say. I like Jimmy Carr, but I don't like the language he uses. I don't understand why he feels it necessary; I find it extremely offensive.
Bobby Davro
#15. Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion ...
Benjamin Franklin
#16. My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.
Sandra Cisneros
#17. First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.
Peter Ellis
#18. Once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed and breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, 'Be whole,' and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.
Neil Gaiman
#19. You cannot rise about your words. A lot of people use foul, pornographic, filthy, language and you SEE, all of those words paint pictures and they reveal the internal thinking of the person on the inside. YOU cannot RISE (forward, onward upward) above your words.
Zig Ziglar
#20. Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
Anne Sexton
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Those who don't understand any language other than the language of force and violence don't respect human dignity. They seek violence because they will be irrelevant without it. We should not go their way.
Shirin Ebadi
#24. There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.
David Whyte
#25. 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
#26. There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.
Patrice Nganang
#27. 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
#28. There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
Eugene H. Peterson
#29. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.
Steven Pinker
#30. Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.
David Kyuman Kim
#31. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
Don DeLillo
#32. Shepherds know many mysterious languages; they speak the language of sheep and dogs, language of stars and skies, flowers and herbs.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#33. They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#34. I believe the United States should allow all foreigners in this country, provided they can speak our native language ... Apache.
Steve Martin
#35. Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a look, far better than a printed book; convey a libel in a frown, and wink a reputation down.
Jonathan Swift
#36. So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
Vikram Seth
#37. The fans are bad everywhere you go, with language, and with behavior. You can't put enough cops in the stands, but you ought to give the cops cameras, give people cameras, so they can take a picture of the idiot and you can identify him.
John Chaney
#38. I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.
S.I. Hayakawa
#39. These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
Alain De Botton
#40. Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.
Santino Hassell
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
Rebecca Solnit
#45. All too often, when people don't know where they are, have jet lag, don't speak the language, and can't figure out the money or maintain intestinal regularity, they get hostile.
Mary-Lou Weisman
#46. All love songs, no matter how eloquent or crude, ornamented or plain, in whatever language they are sung, say essentially the same thing. All love stories have but one meaning.
Lee Siegel
#47. 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
#48. Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
Natasha Trethewey
#49. 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
#50. Language achieves soul only when it's applied as a tool, used by those who imbue it with what they have had the courage and honesty to perceive and feel.
Vanna Bonta
#51. [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich
#52. One of the reasons they [the Japanese] have bad eyesight is probably these microscopic characters [furigana] which have many lines and strokes to them.& We wonder why they went mad and bombed Pearl Harbor when they knew they couldn't win. That [the Japanese language] would be a reason.
L. Ron Hubbard
#53. In the Bengali language, there's not a real word for blow job. They call it "doing the ice cream."
Michael Glawogger
#54. All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.
Richard Foreman
#55. People quickly forget evil because they still haven't created a language to describe it so the world refuses to carry the burden, preferring to forget.
Semezdin Mehmedinovic
#56. The acute attention that ravens pay to our subtle signals underscores the degree to which they can draw conclusions from our body language. They perceive our intentions even though we may not be consciously aware of them.
John M. Marzluff
#57. In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be greedy, while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show compassion.
Thomas Sowell
#58. Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
Louis Menand
#59. The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought
Albert Einstein
#60. 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
#61. At all periods of the [English] language it is difficult to assign a beginning date to most new words and meanings. They tend to slip into the language silently, and are placed in date order only when scholars subsequently get to work.
Robert Burchfield
#62. There are truths, that are beyond us, transcendent truths, about beauty, truth, honor, etc. There are truths that man knows exist, but they cannot be seen - they are immaterial, but no less real, to us. It is only through the language of myth that we can speak of these truths.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#63. If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.
Laura Hillenbrand
#65. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
Robert M. Pirsig
#66. I love performing in front of people, no matter where they come from or what language they speak.
Juanes
#67. We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#68. Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#69. The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
Simone Weil
#70. That's so," said Eliza. "Vacation ends next month. I start Latin this year. They say it's awful. You decline nouns. All _I_ can say is, who wouldn't?
Edward Eager
#71. 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
#72. The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#73. Suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Anne Sexton
#74. In Europe, even more so than in national politics, we have to follow the principle laid down by Martin Luther: Use language that the people will understand, but don't just tell them what they want to hear.
Jean-Claude Juncker
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. My parents were language teachers. They talked about teaching all the time and all their friends were teachers. It was considered a pre-ordained thing that I would go into teaching.
Joanne Harris
#79. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
#80. Romans themselves never read silently, but always aloud; they regarded language as speaking and listening, and viewed writing as merely a convenient means of recording communications spoken and heard.
Anonymous
#81. But, after all, the sciences have made progress, because philosophers have applied themselves with more attention to observe, and have communicated to their language that precision and accuracy which they have employed in their observations: In correcting their language they reason better.
Etienne Bonnot De Condillac
#82. I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.
William Luce
#83. I like the sounds of words. Words are very enjoyable. I like words because they are ... seductive. And I like words because they can contain ... fantasies.
James Lusarde
#84. I will meet my countrymen. I understand only one language: that they are my countrymen, they are my brothers. You may see with whatever colour you want; Modi will not go into that colour.
Narendra Modi
#85. Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
Theodor Adorno
#86. Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.
Anne Carson
#87. The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a war, reduce a lifelong relationship to a collection of memories, or end a life.
Simon S. Tam
#88. Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.
Gail Godwin
#89. There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.
Eugene Schwartz
#90. 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
#91. Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens. The citizens can go on speaking one language or six languages, or no languages if they so choose. Bilingualism is an imposition on the state and not the citizens.
Pierre Trudeau
#92. Shoes transform your body language and attitude. They lift you physically and emotionally.
Christian Louboutin
#93. The characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.
Jean Genet
#94. The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#95. While they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read.
Harold Bell Wright
#96. I love these words that just can't be translated from language to language. They seem dignified, grounded, battling against the imperialism of reality.
Olivier Magny
#97. Words, do not have twins in every language. Sometimes they only have distant cousins, and sometimes they pretend that they are not even related.
Monique Truong
#98. They (Americans) have their national game, baseball - which is cricket played with a strong American accent - and they have a national language, entirely their own, unlike any other language spoken on the earth.
George Mikes
#99. Some version of 'Deal or No Deal' airs in 120 countries. And they play it exactly the same way, with models and briefcases. It crosses language and culture and gender, because it's the simplest game in the world, and everyone wants to press their luck.
Howie Mandel
#100. Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.
Robert Henri
