Top 100 Languages To Quotes
#1. After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967.
Paul Nurse
#2. The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.
James Loeb
#3. INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
Ambrose Bierce
#4. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.
Nicole Krauss
#5. A whipper-snapper of criticism who quoted dead languages to hide his ignorance of life.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
#6. I chose 'No. 1 Ladies' Detective,' or I'll say it chose me, and it was an absolute blessing, for the experience of being in Africa for seven months and learning so many different things, from languages to foods to greetings. On so many levels, it was an incredible experience.
Jill Scott
#7. I've spent enough time studying languages to know that almost any phrase can have two meanings
Ally Carter
#8. The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a
Lyndsay Faye
#9. I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it's really a sign of affection, but I don't see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain.
Erik Naggum
#10. Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
Larry Wall
#11. If there is ever a science of programming language design, it will probably consist largely of matching languages to the design methods they support.
Robert W. Floyd
#13. I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.
Ken Baumann
#14. 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
#15. When my stories were translated into other languages and received good reviews in the international press and won prizes, some Arab festivals and newspapers began to take an interest in what I had produced. This sudden Arab interest is a form of hypocrisy and nonsense.
Hassan Blasim
#16. Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages.
Robert Lane Greene
#17. For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world.... Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages.
Jakob Bohme
#18. To use two languages familiarly and without contaminating one by the other, is very difficult; and to use more than two is hardly to be hoped. The prizes which some have received for their multiplicity of languages may be sufficient to excite industry, but can hardly generate confidence.
Samuel Johnson
#19. CNN was crazy to think they could fill 24 hours with news - let alone around the world in 10 to 20 languages. Reuters or AP with a thousand people around the world covering news? Crazy.
Jason Calacanis
#20. Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
Iain M. Banks
#21. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.
Edward Sapir
#22. I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.
Tim Berners-Lee
#23. The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
Clive James
#24. He had realised that it was Clara he loved, and that he loved her in many different ways. (Because there are even more ways of loving than there are ways of being happy, but it would take another book to explain them all.)
Francois Lelord
#25. Our goal is to see Big History become a normal part of high school curricula. I'd love to see it being taught in lots of languages. A global course.
David Christian
#26. We at The Web Standards Project turned everything on its head. We said browsers should support the same standards instead of competing to invent new tags and scripting languages. We said designers, developers, and content folks should create one site that was accessible to everyone.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#27. Most of the languages that now exist are almost certain to become extinct within this century.
John McWhorter
#28. Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. - DAVE BARRY
Timothy Ferriss
#29. Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.
Octavio Paz
#30. I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation.
Amisha Patel
#31. To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of "languages," styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#32. Empathy is key in the design process, especially when you start expanding outside of your comfort zone to new languages, cultures, and age groups. If you try to assume what those people want, you're likely to get it wrong.
Mike Krieger
#33. Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.
G. Willow Wilson
#34. Man cannot reach the shrine if he does not make the pilgrimage.
Languages are jealous. They do not give up their best treasures to those who try to deal with them through an intermediary belonging to an alien rival.
Rabindranath Tagore
#35. I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.
Miriam Toews
#36. Luckily, languages are like musical instruments: the more you know, the easier it is to pick up new ones.
Patrick Rothfuss
#37. I have learned to interface - what I think would be the contemporary term - with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.
Bono
#38. And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I'm bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message.
Paul Beatty
#39. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent.
Amos Oz
#40. Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.
John Millington Synge
#41. There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.
Yehuda Amichai
#42. Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear ... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak.
Horace Mann
#43. What is it to know a variety of languages, but merely to have a variety of sounds express the same idea? Original thought is ore of the mind; language is but the stamp and coinage by which it is put into circulation.
Washington Irving
#44. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
Alan W. Watts
#45. Do you always curse in Danish?" he asked.
She shook her head and flashed him a smile. "No," she replied. "I can curse in seventeen languages - and I can tell you to fuck me in twenty-four.
M.J. Lawless
#46. A scholar like myself who is not a Sinologist and yet ventures the proposition that Chinese languages should be rewritten in the Greek alphabet (or "Romanized", to use the current term) is treading on uncharted territory (for him) and does so at his peril.
Eric A. Havelock
#47. Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.
William Hazlitt
#48. Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.
Yael Grobglas
#49. People need to see that, far from being an obstacle, the world's diversity of languages, religions and traditions is a great treasure, affording us precious opportunities to recognize ourselves in others.
Youssou N'Dour
#50. My advice to photographers is to get out there in the field and take photographs but also if they are students to finish their course, learn as many languages as possible, go to movies, read books visit museums, broaden your mind.
Martine Franck
#51. One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!
June Jordan
#52. Please don't speak Igbo to him,' Aunty Uju said. 'Two languages will confuse him.'
'What are you talking about, Aunty? We spoke two languages growing up.'
'This is America. It's different.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#53. I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he used to speak in English. He wanted us to be quite fluent in English, especially when he was trying to correct our behavior; he would do that in English.
J.M.G. Le Clezio
#54. Three languages - the video, the music and the live performance - are awesome to bring together.
Planningtorock
#55. Well, maybe so, although I don't think I am particularly gifted in languages. In fact, oddly enough, it may have something to do with my being slow at languages.
Robert Fitzgerald
#56. The heat of black holes is like the Rosetta stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages- quantum, gravitational, and thermodynamic- still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time.
Carlo Rovelli
#57. Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didn't even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.
Roger Federer
#58. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
Alan Perlis
#59. I speak languages with more ease than I read or write them, she explains. It is something in the feel of the sounds. I could attempt to put them on paper but I am sure the result would be appalling.
Erin Morgenstern
#60. Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.
Larry Wall
#61. The warrior knows that the most important words in all languages are the small words. Yes. Love. God. They are words that are easy enough to say and which fill vast empty spaces.
Paulo Coelho
#62. I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them.
Orhan Pamuk
#63. Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.
Judith Lynne Hanna
#64. With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.
Edmund De Waal
#65. In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to communicate with the animals.
Carl Sagan
#66. Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#67. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
Herman Melville
#68. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.
Richard Lamm
#69. From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.
Noam Chomsky
#70. It's the story of New York. Storefronts change and languages change, but at the end of the day, people come here to find opportunity like my family did.
Sal Albanese
#71. Aidan pulled against his bonds. "They keep talking to him in a whole bunch of languages. A lot of French. Something about the Thorn of Istra. I think he's in trouble."
"Are you?" Tana asked.
"Not exactly," said Gavriel.
Holly Black
#72. I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.
Karl Lagerfeld
#73. I have always thought foreigners with their unusual skin colours, mad languages and ignorant customs absolutely hilarious, and I think it's a shame that in recent years its become unfashionable to poke fun at them. I certainly don't think they themselves ever minded it.
Arthur Mathews
#74. I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.
Dennis Ritchie
#75. I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set.
Lee Van Cleef
#76. Star canto: star speaks light, and world to world
Repeats the passage of the universe
To God; the name of Christ
the one great word
Well worth all languages in earth or heaven.
Philip James Bailey
#77. When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.
David Antin
#79. The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages.
China Mieville
#80. In many languages, even the word for human being is "one who goes on migrations." Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.
Gloria Steinem
#81. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn't taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable.
Hussein Chalayan
#82. Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.
Maya Angelou
#83. In the Far Eastern languages we have many different words to describe the varying degrees of reality that a thing, a state of mind or plane of being may have.
Frederick Lenz
#84. I would like to write a suicide note in three and a half
languages
and travel south on a Thursday towards
some form of life outside of earth
Eric Gamalinda
#85. Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C
Eric S. Raymond
#86. He sang 'Stairway to Heaven' in four different languages but never knew where that staircase stood.
Sherman Alexie
#87. The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.
Noam Chomsky
#88. To look it at another way, surely there are many unfortunate people who have needed to undergo multiple stomach surgeries. Yet no one would hand a scalpel over to them and ask them to perform the same surgery they received on another person, simply because they themselves had undergone it so often.
Kato Lomb
#89. Although he thinks he's awesome at them, Andrew really sucks at languages. Once, he tried to speak French to this woman who owned the C'est La Vie bakery back home, and she gave him a cookie because she thought he was mentally challenged. (Page 21)
Alicia Thompson
#90. From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra's irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will - really a great political genius, in that respect.
Stacy Schiff
#91. I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!
Caroline Lawrence
#92. I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.
Joshua Foer
#93. Bobby and I went through some old questionnaires about customer requirements for languages, then we compiled a new one and sent it out to a few dozen people we knew.
James Frank
#94. When it comes to languages, I'm passably fluent in HTML.
Bernie Su
#95. That you've got to do anything that you feel is precious. I especially believe that about cultures and languages. You've got to be really conscious because time is running out.
Gwenno
#96. There was an otherworldly quality about him, the aura of one privy to secret communiques in forgotten languages.
James K. Morrow
#97. Even though Cammie is fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man seven different ways with her bare hands, she has no idea what to do when she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she's an ordinary girl.
Ally Carter
#98. 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
#99. In Europe, kids learn at least four languages before they're out of high school. But our education system is so underfunded, they go to school to buy heroin and an AK-47.
Eddie Griffin
#100. If your kids attend school and grades are up that will make $1,000 contributions to some 10,000 kids across the country, are challenging kids to learn foreign languages or challenging kids to get summer jobs or seek summer enrichment opportunities?
Harold Ford Jr.
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