Quotes About Language And The World

#1. All alone - shorn of context, without captions - a photograph is neither true nor false ... For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.

Errol Morris

#2. Everything in the universe has life and you must always try to sty in contact with that life. It understands your language and the world will begin to take on a different meaning for you.

Paulo Coelho

#3. No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on "the given." Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#4. I am learning the Language of World and everything in the world is beginning to make sense to me

Paulo Coelho

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors.

Alain De Botton

#8. And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons.

Andrew Solomon

#9. The sighing of the devotee clears a path for him into the world unseen, and his tears wash away the sins of ages. All revelation follows the ecstasy; all knowledge that a book can never contain, that a language can never express, nor a teacher teach, comes to him of itself.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#10. Music gives us a language that cuts across the disciplines, helps us to see connections and brings a more coherent meaning to our world.

Ernest L. Boyer

#11. The best way in the world to deceive believers is to cloak a message in religious language and declare that it conveys some new insight from God.

Charles Stanley

#12. Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world.

Augustine Birrell

#13. The 2 timeless drivers that underpin the behavior of every generation: the need to belong and the need to be significant. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#14. When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

Noam Chomsky

#15. Two of the saddest words in the English language are, 'What party?' And L.A. is the 'What party?' capital of the world.

Carrie Fisher

#16. All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.

Julian Jaynes

#17. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

P.D. James

#18. There are Latino people in our world who believe strongly that if you are Latino you should speak the language, you should eat the food, you should listen to the music, you should be proud. And when you don't do those things, some people will look at it as if you're neglecting who you are.

Selenis Leyva

#19. Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would notfollow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).

Donald Davidson

#20. I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

Steven Pinker

#21. Musicians can travel all over the world and have an audience, because there's no language barrier.

Tommy Chong

#22. The film [Boy and the World]gave me the possibility to create a new language. Animation is a very rich medium but hasn't fully been exploited by artists. Often artists are trapped by words.

Alex Abreu

#23. English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.

Bernardo Bertolucci

#24. The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.

Yann Martel

#25. 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

#26. No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

Edward Sapir

#27. Women are better at reading body language everywhere in the world. As a matter of fact, it's associated with the female hormone estrogen. Women are better at figuring out of tone of voice, reading your face and posture and gesture.

Helen Fisher

#28. All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

E.L. Doctorow

#29. We can never know more than the mind can assimilate and process, nor can we discuss any aspect of the world for which there is no language.

Padma Viswanathan

#30. The language he used was that of a man who was sick and tired of the world he lived in - though he had much liking for his fellow men - and had resolved, for his part, to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth.

Albert Camus

#31. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

Theodore Bikel

#32. I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

Shirley Jackson

#33. By Anglicising ourselves we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim we have upon the world's recognition of us as a seperate nationality ... the notes of nationality, our language and customs.

Douglas Hyde

#34. I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

Margaret Mahy

#35. Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.

Michael Dirda

#36. 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

#37. If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter.

P. J. O'Rourke

#38. The world is so big and words are so small!

Marty Rubin

#39. People become fascinated with pictures and words, and wind up forgetting the Language of the World

Paulo Coelho

#40. We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?

Ursula K. Le Guin

#41. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language. It's a miserable feeling. I've had it all my life. At the high school the girls would stand in groups and just look at me. I was queer and different and everybody knew it.

Jean Webster

#42. Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.

Jean Webster

#43. The world is not the most pleasant place. Eventually your parents leave you and nobody is going to go out of their way to protect you unconditionally. You need to learn to stand up for yourself and what you believe and sometimes, pardon my language, kick some ass.

Queen Elizabeth II

#44. Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking; love has found.

Honore De Balzac

#45. By what procedures do men establish the rule-governed links they do between language, on the one hand, and the real world, on the other?

Allan Janik

#46. We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.

Jacque Fresco

#47. Participating in the filling of others' brains with knowledge and know-how is just an extraordinary gift only very few have. Hence, teaching a language is indeed opening these brains to the world with its similarities and dissimilarities taught in different words.

Messaoud Mohammed

#48. A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.

Frank Herbert

#49. The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies - all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect

David Levithan

#50. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Robert Hughes

#51. To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

Emile M. Cioran

#52. A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

Frantz Fanon

#53. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#54. To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

Rachel Cusk

#55. Story is the mother of us all. First we wrap our lives in language and then we act on who we say we are. We proceed from the word into the world and make a world based on our stories.

Christina Baldwin

#56. Interestingly, vinifera is native to the same ara of southwestern Russia as the original Indo-European peoples, whose prehistoric migrations carried the Indo-European language and the vinifera grape to all parts of the ancient world.

Jeff Cox

#57. Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge' ... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.

Sufjan Stevens

#58. If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.

P. J. O'Rourke

#59. It's very freaky in Chicago.There's something in the water there, I don't know what it is. But the actual word Chicago means, in the Indian language, garlic. It was just garlic and mosquitoes there.And that is the roughest city on the planet, and I been to every place in the world.

Quincy Jones

#60. This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#61. The film language is still in development and the traditional dialogue is the biggest problem because nobody knows how to interpret it in 3D world.

Timur Bekmambetov

#62. 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

#63. If you had the seeds of pestilence in your body you would not have a more active contagion that you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.

Horace Bushnell

#64. As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don't.

Charles De Lint

#65. I feel that as the world becomes more and more multicultural, it's a good tool to be able to speak another language.

Sarah Shahi

#66. Yes, writers are writing in all corners of the world. Yes they are writing in countries rich and poor. Yes, they are writing despite threats to their freedom of speech or even to their very lives. . . . everywhere on earth writers were writing in their own language.

Minae Mizumura

#67. 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

#68. Wherever we go in the world we find other men speaking the same language, planning the same plans, dreaming the same dreams. And one of the big four - brownie, or brookie, cutthroat or rainbow - is the cause of it all

Roderick Haig-Brown

#69. The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.

Havelock Ellis

#70. Mystics throughout the world have spoken of the inner experience of unity with the Self, a reality defined in our language by the Sanskrit term yoga, meaning union, and the word "religion", which comes from the Latin religare, meaning to bind or link.

Gwenael Verez

#71. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.

Minae Mizumura

#72. she and Ben chattered away to each other in the language of mothers with their toddlers; the two understood every word exchanged, while the rest of the world just listened, smiled, and didn't understand a single word of the happy gibberish.

William R. Forstchen

#73. A child playing with dolls may shed heartfelt tears when his bundle of rags and scraps becomes deathly ill and dies ... So we may come to an understanding of language as playing with dolls: in language, scraps of sound are used to make dolls and replace all the things in the world.

Velimir Khlebnikov

#74. Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.

Robert Reich

#75. I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

Kim Hyesoon

#76. I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read. I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

Don DeLillo

#77. In an ideal world, the voices that teach us language teach us self-respect, self-confidence, and self-esteem. Those same voices also form in us humility and gratitude, and as those voices inform our inner voices, they also pass on wisdom.

Erwin Raphael McManus

#78. 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

#79. I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things.

Alice Oswald

#80. The more English is heard in the world, the more gratifying it seems to speak French, and above all to know the culture of our country. They find a kind of French social grace in the language and culture.

Bernard Pivot

#81. Language expresses people's thinking and it was by a Word that God created the world and preserves it.

Walter Lang

#82. With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.

Andrew Davidson

#83. In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#84. In the scriptures there is no such thing as righteous pride - it is always considered a sin. Therefore, no matter how the world uses the term, we must understand how God uses the term so we can understand the language of holy writ and profit thereby.

Ezra Taft Benson

#85. I am glad that Zimbabwe and China speak the same language on many issues. We share the same conviction that only a fair, just, and non-prescriptive world order, based on the principles of the charter of the United Nations, can deliver the development we all need.

Robert Mugabe

#86. Sometimes the signs and signals of the non-language speaking world are not very clear. Then we have to walk in trust, move forward step by small step, until we are sure of the proper path.

Elaine Seiler

#87. The real work of feminism is to empower a woman and to give her language to express a new value system for the world. The new feminism must create both the process by which we generate influence and the influence itself.

Elizabeth Lesser

#88. I'm trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through.

Sean Lennon

#89. Please stop using the word "Negro." ... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us.

Mary Church Terrell

#90. I've traveled around the world, and what's so revealing is that, despite the differences in culture, politics, language, how people dress, there is a universal feeling that we all want the same thing. We deeply want to be respected and appreciated for our differences.

Howard Schultz

#91. Shall I tell you what supported me through all those years of exile among a people whose language I could not understand and whose attitude towards me we always uncertain and often hostile? It was this: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world".

David Livingstone

#92. Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#93. He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language.

Patti Smith

#94. My father taught me how to track, how to read the ground and the trees. He taught me that everything has a language, that if you knew the language, you could make the world talk. The grass and the dirt hold secrets, he'd say. The wind and the water carry stories and warnings.

Victoria Schwab

#95. I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations ... There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.

Teresa Jordan

#96. The benefits of science are not only material ones. The truths that science teaches are of common interest the world over. The language of science is universal, and is a powerful force in bringing the peoples of the world closer together.

Arthur Compton

#97. Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.

Robert Lane Greene

#98. The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.

Etgar Keret

#99. The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted. There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.

Paul Valery

#100. As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.

Aaron Siskind