Quotes About Language And Thinking

#1. When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function.

Phil Klay

#2. It is an absolute privilege to be able to speak another language and have it be something you grew up with. I think it's a very important thing and I think that everywhere else in the world people speak more than one language.

Lucy Liu

#3. I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Matthea Harvey

#4. What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.

James Elkins

#5. The Black Parade only has two songs left. Then you'll have to deal with the likes of My Chemical Romance. Personally ... I think their language is atrocious and they don't know how to dress.

Gerard Way

#6. I write. I have read a great deal. I enjoy books. I like the wit of languages. Even French I like. I like to be able to think in different modes. I like to be able to use the language a great deal and carry on rehearsals in French.

Twyla Tharp

#7. We are not taught to think decently on sex subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language.

George Bernard Shaw

#8. Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating.

Ken Robinson

#9. I can use movie as a language. Not only could it send a good message, I could let people know about my thinking and how I see the world, how I see the colour, how I see the music, how I see everything.

John Woo

#10. The Gaelic language itself depends very much on ear and rhythm, and when those who are thinking in Gaelic speak in English, they get the same rhythm.

Lady Gregory

#11. We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

George Carlin

#12. On the one hand, our minds try to probe the ephemeral reality of the quantum world; on the other, we talk, think, and act in a language adapted for discussing trees, rocks, and automobiles
as well as poetry and emotions.

F. David Peat

#13. Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints
the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk
we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Harry Mathews

#14. The easiest books are generally the best; for, whatever author is obscure and difficult in his own language, certainly does not think clearly.

Bill Vaughan

#15. Always thinks of the other; ego thinks only of oneself. Love is always considerate; ego is absolutely inconsiderate. Ego has only one language and that is of self. Ego always uses the other; love is ready to be used, love is ready to serve.

Philip Toshio Sudo

#16. He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner.

Washington Irving

#17. Language is in the way. Music's in the way. Songs are in the way. Stuff's in the way. That's just our state here. And to acknowledge that we're broken and to even ... create tradition that helps us embrace that, and to understand that, I think is a very healthy, good thing.

Crowder

#18. I hear from so many women who really started to pay attention to it at all times and stopped, you know, touching their faces and necks and playing with their hair and twisting their legs. I think women become more aware of it when they learn about this stuff, and you see their body language change.

Amy Cuddy

#19. Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.

Willa Cather

#20. Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

Martin Heidegger

#21. Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

Edward Hirsch

#22. You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible.

David Cronenberg

#23. I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#24. Real change comes when people are enabled to use their thinking and their energy in a new way, using a different system of thought, different language, and having fresh visions of the future.

Scilla Elworthy

#25. Coach Cunningham's my guy. Without me saying a word, he can read my body language and facial expressions and tell me exactly what I'm thinking and feeling. We're actually very similar people.

Ndamukong Suh

#26. No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.

Peter Slezak

#27. Sometimes only poetry can say it. I think there's just this deeper language, and away of putting your world back together again and breaking through barriers.

Laura Nyro

#28. You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

David Nicholls

#29. I think the language of science is highly lyrical and evocative and an important part of our lives in many ways.

Pattiann Rogers

#30. I think that there's only one nationality and one language in the sport, and you call it performance.

Wladimir Klitschko

#31. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

Haruki Murakami

#32. We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

Edward Hirsch

#33. His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.

Richard Mitchell

#34. Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It's doing unusual and playful things with the language, stirring it up. And prose is not doing that. Primarily it's not attempting to do that.

Pattiann Rogers

#35. I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

William Golding

#36. I think I am good in the department of body language and fighting, and stuff like that. It's just natural to me, maybe because I love sports.

Antonio Banderas

#37. Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

David Nicholls

#38. The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or 'feeling-thinking' to define language that speaks the truth. Eduardo Galeano

Rob Brezsny

#39. There's nothing good about being certain about things. And I don't think there's any real talent in using language in a manipulative way, with phrases like "tax relief" or "Social Security reform." It's politically clever, but it's also completely disingenuous, and it's not something to aspire to.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#40. I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

A.S. Byatt

#41. In fact, is beginning to use a lot of the language and phraseology that we have used. In fact, I think I saw Hillary Clinton TV ad, and I thought it was me.

Hillary Clinton

#42. I think yes is the most beautiful and necessary word in the English language.

Sally Potter

#43. I think that, in Hebrew, it's like the language creates a more unique and specific universe even before the story.

Etgar Keret

#44. I want to make movies - and I want to portray characters - that make people think. I want to make movies that have a redemptive message. I want to tell good quality stories and take out the derogatory sex, violence and language.

Drew Waters

#45. When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.

Maria Montessori

#46. I think it's important to be sincere. And I could be the most sincere just staying in [my] mother language actually. And that's the reason why I stay composing and writing in French.

Stromae

#47. I will not compromise on language or content. At 15, people can handle the same language as me, they're just as complicated as me and are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time.

Aidan Chambers

#48. I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

Jane Hirshfield

#49. A critic is a person who rationalizes his likes and dislikes in such impressive language that the layman thinks he is reasoning instead of rationalizing.

Helen McCloy

#50. You and I who read and write books have very little effect upon language. We may think about it, write about it, and read about it, but it goes on without us, or in spite of us.

Charlton Laird

#51. In the mainstream film market, certainly in television, sex is handled fairly discreetly. I think the abuse of extraordinarily graphic violence and language presses much closer to the tolerance of public taste.

Charlton Heston

#52. I think photography is a universal language as far as storytelling goes, and I think that's what it's most successful at.

Mary Mattingly

#53. Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

Grant Morrison

#54. Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#55. We're very concerned with language and how language works. We're trying to engage people rather than dictate how they should be thinking.

Neville Brody

#56. The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#57. Ram Mohan Roy would have been a greater reformer and Lokmanya Tilak a greater scholar if they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English.

Mahatma Gandhi

#58. I really believe amendment " to make English our common and unifying language" is racist. I think it's directed basically to people who speak Spanish.

Ruben Aguilar

#59. The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.

Kim Hyesoon

#60. The four most important words in the English language are, "What do you think?" Listen to your people and learn.

J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr.

#61. 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

#62. A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#63. It think acceptance levels sort of swings back and forth. Like in the 60's there was a lot more freedom with sex that doesn't exist today. Language has gotten pushed a bit farther and violence is way far out.

Bob Saget

#64. I think that every film should have its own structure, and that's the beauty of film language - is that we get to express that deeply individualistic side of ourselves.

Brian Lindstrom

#65. When you're making the film, you don't really think the audience; it's only when you start editing that you really start to became aware of your audience because you're thinking of how you communicate these ideas, and how lucid can you be, and yet stay within the language you've established.

Jonathan Glazer

#66. My task as a language arts teacher is to provide texts that are not so difficult that my students shut down in frustration and not so easy that my students don't push their thinking.

Kimberly Hill Campbell

#67. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.

Bruno Dumont

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. No nation can survive without passing its heritage, language and, yes, faith to the next generation. A country must be built on something substantial and if the cultural elitists think it can be built on 'diversity,' that is a foundation of shifting sand.

Cal Thomas

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

David Plotz

#76. The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

Antonio Machado

#77. Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.

Matthew De Abaitua

#78. Your language indicates--and limits--what you think.

Jonathan Price

#79. I don't really think differently of making a movie for grownups or making a movie for kids, if it's boring it's boring, so you want it to be entertaining and I think funny is funny whether it's for kids or grownups, the only real difference is language.

Jack Black

#80. First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life.

Tom Robbins

#81. SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

Philip Greenspun

#82. I feel like really thinking about art and really appreciating it and learning the language of it just makes you more of a connoisseur. I believe that.

David Rees

#83. There's a theory, and I think the theory is right, that in order to make a change you've got to make the whole language of the page harmonious. Well, that's a lot easier with a computer.

Robert Caro

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

Walter Lang

#85. I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony.

Mahan Esfahani

#86. I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!

Naomi Shihab Nye

#87. In order for architecture to experience its ongoing evolution as a language, there has to be a lot of adjusted copies between how architects draw, think, engage bylaws and constraints.

Jimenez Lai

#88. 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

#89. Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.

Claudia Rankine

#90. As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

Larry Wall

#91. I see more now. As far as concepts, I know where teammates are going, linemen are going. I can read defensive fronts. I can read the body language of linebackers. I study film to see who's a bull rusher and who's a finesse rusher. I think I've learned.

Brandon Jacobs

#92. I think of architecture as language, and I look within the intra-communication between architects.

Jimenez Lai

#93. I think it's really important these days to be able to relate to how the music flows and be able to speak the same language as your bandmates and the producer, rather than just talking drums.

Matt Cameron

#94. I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about the language used in relation to the two.

Talal Asad

#95. My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it's plenitude.

Eduardo Galeano

#96. I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.

Martin Luther

#97. I think people are tired of being slammed with foul language and sexual content that really has nothing to do with (telling a good story) ...

Shari Wiedmann

#98. Producers think in the language of abundance rather than scarcity, take initiative instead of waiting for someone else to provide them with opportunity, and boldly venture wise risks instead of surrendering to fear that they can't make a difference.

Oliver DeMille

#99. We think that this is just our world and we don't know what other people are thinking. Music actually is a phenomenal connector in that respect. It's a special language that defines certain boundaries and connects people in a particular way, a very emotional way, I have found.

Annie Lennox

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

Seymour Papert