Quotes About Human Language

#1. 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

#2. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love.

Paul Eluard

#3. There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind

Noam Chomsky

#4. The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.

Malidoma Patrice Some

#5. Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

Thomas Paine

#6. Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.

Jay Griffiths

#7. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

Carl Sandburg

#8. The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

Garth Stein

#9. As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

Umberto Eco

#10. It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way.

David Foster Wallace

#11. A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

Seymour Papert

#12. All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis.

Jacques Ellul

#13. If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.

David Novak

#14. The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

#15. Human language is the new UI layer, bots are like new applications, and digital assistants are meta apps. Intelligence is infused into all of your interactions.

Satya Nadella

#16. Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

Noam Chomsky

#17. To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend ... I suppose I ought to have realize it's ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

Robert Harris

#18. Dogs can't speak English. Nor any human language - save, in one notable exception, Luxembourgish, which is only comprehensible to bankers and Luxembourgers, and therefore hardly of any use at all. No, you've eaten something disagreeable and are having a nightmare, that's all.

Ransom Riggs

#19. In human language, selling a smoking pot for three gold pieces is called a 'swindle,'" the man said, narrowly escaping a kick in the shins.
"In Elfish language it's called 'genius,'" the little elf replied cheerfully ...

Silvana De Mari

#20. I am calling attention just to the main points of these tremendously important matters, which can be understood better by pious meditation than explained by human language.

Martin Chemnitz

#21. Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

W. H. Auden

#22. Human language falls short of expressing all that He is, even as a thimble lacks capacity to hold Niagara Falls.

Blake Western

#23. Too many people are too angry about language too much of the time. This time could be better spent listening, learning, and enjoying the vast variety of human language around them.

Robert Lane Greene

#24. Prayer simply means a longing of the heart, it is the wish felt, - it may be expressed, or not expressed. It may take the form of human language or it may never be uttered at all; still it is a prayer, if God only hears it in the secret recess of the heart.

Keshub Chandra Sen

#25. Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#26. The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.

Will Ferguson

#27. Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times.

Carl Jung

#28. In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language.

Mikhail Tal

#29. Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A

Kim Stanley Robinson

#30. most obvious application of functions is defining new vocabulary. Creating new words in regular, human-language prose is usually bad style. But in programming, it is indispensable.

Marijn Haverbeke

#31. Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

Mahatma Gandhi

#32. The nation provided a human with the things that are most human - language and a past that stretched back before his birth.

George Friedman

#33. Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

James C. Maxwell

#34. My name on his lips is a symphony. How can two simple beats of basic human language engulf me so completely? We stare at each other for a mini infinity. I'm terrified of speaking and breaking the spell that's fallen over us.

Sarah Nicolas

#35. Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help.

Thomas Keating

#36. Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

Robert Bringhurst

#37. As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can't describe how bad you feel, but joy on the other hand is far too divine for human language.

Criss Jami

#38. The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#39. Human Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

Gustave Flaubert

#40. What is music? Music is language. A human being wants to express ideas in this language, but not ideas that can be translated into concepts ...

Anton Webern

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws.

Nataly Kelly

#46. 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

#47. I think language is the most important thing that human beings have ever accomplished, and the only thing that's really going to get us all out of the troubles that we find ourselves in.

Paul Bettany

#48. Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person's eyes.

Oliver Sacks

#49. To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.

Aldous Huxley

#50. [Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.

Aristophanes

#51. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

John Steinbeck

#52. The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.

Flemming Rose

#53. I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.

Will Oldham

#54. I suggest that the emergence of descriptive language is at the root of the human power of imagination, of human inventiveness, and therefore the emergence of world 3.

Karl R. Popper

#55. Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access.

Carol Windley

#56. Daemon spoke in his language. The lyrical quality of his words made no sense to me.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"There's really no translation for it," he said, "but the closest human words would be, you are beautiful to me.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#57. The strongest human emotion is probably love. I think it's universal. I think that across language and country and time and everything else, probably love.

Mark Hoppus

#58. I wanted to be understood. As a human-being, and as a writer. That meant getting to (truly) know myself- away from the opinions, beliefs, assumptions, criticism, and judgement of others. It meant re-learning language... to speak concisely. It meant learning the language of my heart and soul.

Cheri Bauer

#59. What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.

George Herbert Mead

#60. You see, the language of words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I have pointed out. The language of sighs, the language of silent moments, and most significantly, the language of frowns.

Matt Haig

#61. 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

#62. A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.

Victor Hugo

#63. Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Iris Murdoch

#64. The future belongs to social media. It is egalitarian and inclusive. Social media is not about any country, any language, any colour, any community but it is about human values and that is the underlying link binding humanity.

Narendra Modi

#65. The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.

Charles Murray

#66. Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.

Jonathan Sacks

#67. Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

Larry Wall

#68. The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing.

John N. Gray

#69. The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#70. If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero's speeches are language as practical tool.

Thomas Cahill

#71. Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

Mary Pipher

#72. Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human.

Carmen Boullosa

#73. Most human beings know only the language of exploitation. Due to their selfishness, they are unable to consider others.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#74. Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.

Leonard Mlodinow

#75. Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

#76. They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.

Paul Celan

#77. Whether consciously or not, sexist God language undermines the human equality of women made in the divine image and likeness.

Elizabeth A. Johnson

#78. Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#79. We are not speaking gibberish. We're speaking the sacred language of the Qur'an, the language of great Calipha and Saladin, the most beautiful intricate of all human tongues. "
" Well it sounds like a Racoon clearing it's throat.

John Green

#80. Saint Francis of Assisi understood the power of faith put into action to change the human heart, for it was he who said, "Preach the gospel always; when necessary use words." We had not yet spoken a word in their language, but the village elders had already "heard" the gospel.

Richard Stearns

#81. As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.

Aleksandar Hemon

#82. The Democrats are using the human trafficking bill's language that's been there for 40 years, regarding the use of federal funds for abortion.

Barack Obama

#83. The old languages - at least the ones I know - don't have gender. They don't have gendered pronouns. There's no "he" and "she." A human being is a human being.

Gloria Steinem

#84. Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

Pattiann Rogers

#85. The words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language ... those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

Donald Miller

#86. Comen out, leetle rodents," the human called in a language that the companions could not understand. The wizard reiterated the request in another tongue, then in drow, and then in two more unknown tongues, and then in svirfneblin. He continued on for many minutes,

R.A. Salvatore

#87. There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.

Joshua Foer

#88. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

A.S. Byatt

#89. It is within and through language that the human mind points to itself.

James N. Powell

#90. Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

Karl Marx

#91. Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.

Carl Sagan

#92. What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Jane Goodall

#93. [Allegory] is a flight by which the human wit attempts at one and the same time to investigate two objects, and consequently is fitted only to the most exalted geniuses.

Sarah Fielding

#94. The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language.

Monique Wittig

#95. Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.

Edward De Bono

#96. Language should fulfill your individual existence as a wholesome human being ... Language should be more than just getting by.

Chogyam Trungpa

#97. Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

Diane Ackerman

#98. Sign is a live, contemporaneous, visual-gestural language and consists of hand shapes, hand positioning, facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body.

Myron Uhlberg

#99. 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

#100. Spirituality is a natural part of ourselves, as natural as emotions, but we've got all the language wrong and made this divide between secularism and spirituality, whereas instead it's about being human.

Alan Green