Top 100 Language They Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.
David Kyuman Kim
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I love performing in front of people, no matter where they come from or what language they speak.
Juanes
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. When it comes to tyrants, dictators and terrorists, strength and the threat of force is the only language they understand.
Kevin McCarthy
#11. Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don't allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn't give them stories in which it is used.
Chris Crutcher
#12. Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#13. The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.
Heinrich Heine
#14. When it comes to telling children stories, they don't need simple language. They need beautiful language.
Philip Pullman
#15. The Foundation has secrets. They have books, old books - so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and may use them.
Isaac Asimov
#16. My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.
Barry Hannah
#17. This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with'disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.
Amy Reed
#18. Although citizens of the same country who spoke the same language, they belonged to two different worlds. These worlds were far apart and their chances of meeting slim. But an encounter that happens against such long odds is bound to produce stories.
Xu Xiaobin
#19. Uncharted territory," I said. "The parts on the maps of our lives that we don't understand. In cartographer's language they call these places sleeping beauties.
Christopher Barzak
#20. I speak to everyone in the language they understand," said Ender. "That isn't being slick. It's being clear
Orson Scott Card
#21. If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Terence McKenna
#22. I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.
William Jones
#23. Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#24. Do you know why the French are so honest? because there are so few words in their language they're forced to be.
William Gaddis
#25. There is a rhythm to our language. they echo the rhythm of our life.
Ninotaziz
#26. This book [ "Win"] is based on the interviews with three dozen Fortune 400 - or Forbes 400, the richest people, and a couple dozen of the top CEOs.I wanted to know what language they use to be successful, and I wanted to know the attributes that could then be applied to the average individual.
Frank Luntz
#27. While infants will sync with the human voice regardless of language, they later become habituated to the rhythms of their own language and culture ... humans are tied to each other by hierarchies of rhythms that are culture-specific and expressed through language and body movement.
Edward T. Hall
#28. Men are creatures of passion and prejudice. The language they must use to communicate is an imperfect medium, clouded by emotion and colored by interest, as well as inadequately transparent for thought.
Mortimer J. Adler
#29. Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Lynne Truss
#30. She knew she had changed too, but not as they had changed, and it puzzled her. She sat and watched them and she felt herself an alien among them, as alien and lonely as if she had come from another world, speaking a language they did not understand and she not understanding theirs.
Margaret Mitchell
#31. There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.
Edna Ferber
#32. More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.
David Grossman
#33. When I visited Ireland with my father and heard the people on the farm talking, I couldn't believe the gift of language they had. I felt very untalented.
John Patrick Shanley
#34. Remember that although they may speak a different language, they are still the same kind of people as the folks you know at home, have the same mental processes, are just as kindly and just as friendly. Remember that, quit talking and start over again - in pantomime.
Wally Byam
#35. I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise,
Jacqueline Woodson
#36. The citizens of Ludania would finally be free, no longer forced into a class system that determined what language they could speak, what jobs they could do, or who they could be
Kimberly Derting
#37. You may imagine the joy manifested by these poor Africans, when they heard one of their own color address them in a friendly manner, and in a language they could comprehend!
Lewis Tappan
#38. There were seven men, but just one language. They also moved as one and ate one meal a day and slept in the same bed and knew the same women with whom they'd made the same child. They worked for the same firm as the father. They were the future.
Blake Butler
#39. Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.
Jay Griffiths
#40. I think foreign countries really do like it when American artists sing in their language. And when you go over there and say, 'Hi, how are you?' in their language, they love it. It makes them feel like you're doing it just for them. We in America take so much for granted.
Natalie Cole
#41. The other creatures with which we share this world have their rights too, but not speaking our language, they have no voice, no vote; it is our moral duty to take care of them.
Roger Tory Peterson
#42. The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions.
James Welch
#43. It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don't like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn't speak that language. They didn't learn it as children and they didn't manage to pick it up as adults, either.
Jodi Picoult
#44. If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood as a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not 'ant-made'.
C.S. Lewis
#45. I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that's not a bad way to write.
Morris Gleitzman
#46. I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.
P.D. Ouspensky
#47. The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same.
Marjane Satrapi
#48. Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring.
Alan Moore
#49. All the world's religions speak the same language, they simply use different words.
Matthew Clark
#50. He had figured out that thoughts exist in silence and have no colour or sound or shape until they are turned into words. Spoken words exist in the mind first and then go to the voice and sit temporarily inside ears, and if words are conveyed through sign language, they exist in the motion of hands.
Rita Leganski
#51. When a Quebecker is interviewed for French TV, he or she is often subtitled in 'normal' French, as if the language they speak in francophone Canada is so barbarous that Parisians won't be able to understand
Stephen Clarke
#52. So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They that understand the meaning of language understand language and life better!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#53. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn't entirely certain. It wouldn't have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don't care much about gender, and the language they speak - my own first language - doesn't mark gender in any way.
Ann Leckie
#54. Without a passport humans wouldn't know where they're from, who they are or who their enemy is, and their enemy wouldn't know why they had an enemy, what language they spoke, and where best to avoid.
The passport is said to be what makes them free, but if freedom is given, freedom cannot be free.
Craig Stone
#55. In Buenos Aires, I have a very close friend who speaks very good English, and she taught me. It was quite difficult because the muscles of your mouth are used to your language, and then when you want to speak another language, they don't go to the place they need to go to make the sound.
Elena Roger
#56. Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.
Alice Sebold
#57. Somebody once said that the Irish derived the greatest benefit from the English language. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter, they fling it at the sky like paint pots full of rainbow colors.
Malachy McCourt
#58. Let's keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect.
George S. Patton
#59. They move their bodies and hands to communicate. Imagination even applies to language. They often make
Carol Tuttle
#60. You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.
Paul Graham
#61. [deconstruction and other French theories] was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.
Jean Baudrillard
#62. In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.
Richard Rodriguez
#63. Comics are an international language, they can cross boundaries and generations. Comics are a bridge between all cultures.
Osamu Tezuka
#64. I still recall clearly. Two doctors were talking to me about her in front of her, as though she couldn't comprehend the language. They then turned to her using baby talk.
Denise Crompton
#65. The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
Thomas Paine
#66. We speak the love language, they speak from pain and anguish.
Some don't love theyselves, so they perception is tainted.
Talib Kweli
#67. I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked - Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).
Manil Suri
#68. When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.
Jim Woodring
#69. Their language was an old wild language. They had known incredible loves and dark adventures and the twisted streets of alien cities. They had known the green breaking waves of the sea, and the green aisles of the silent forests. They had known war and death and fierce, cruel elation.
Winifred Holtby
#70. Now and again he spoke to those that served him and thanked them in their own language. They smiled at him and said laughing: 'Here is a jewel among hobbits!
J.R.R. Tolkien
#71. Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It's a language aside from the language they have with strangers. I've always been maybe an abuser of alliteration, but I've always loved it and I like how those words sound together.
Ben Gibbard
#72. Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.
S.I. Hayakawa
#73. Gossip has always been a problem. It is one of the most powerful, addictive behaviors there is. As long as the human race has had a common language they have used it to gossip.
John Patrick Hickey
#74. How comes it that you curse, Frere Jean? It's only, said the monk, in order to embellish my language. They are the colors of Ciceronian rhetoric.
Francois Rabelais
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.
Rick Perlstein
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
Anne Sexton
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
