Quotes About Language And Understanding

#1. Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

David Crystal

#2. An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Edith Wharton

#3. I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register. It's the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.

Joss Whedon

#4. More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

John W. Vessey Jr.

#5. Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

Chuck Palahniuk

#6. Language and culture cannot be separated. Language is vital to understanding our unique cultural perspectives. Language is a tool that is used to explore and experience our cultures and the perspectives that are embedded in our cultures.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

#7. Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform's native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.

Gary Vaynerchuk

#8. Learn the language that they understand, and when they come upon our doorstep to talk we can talk, and they will get the point. There will be a dialog, there will be some communication, and I am quite certain that then there will be some understanding.

Malcolm X

#9. New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding - great uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only seems flat, the sun only seems to circle the earth, matter only seems solid.

Marilyn Ferguson

#10. I think the best part of learning a language is that you can see the country's culture through the language. And it gives you different levels of understanding of that culture when you really try to dig in and learn it.

Mark Lippert

#11. One of the great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all understanding between those who speak the same language and have the same interests.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#12. 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

#13. I think that's what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it's not a secret at all; men just don't know how to listen.

Marlon James

#14. The world has a soul and whoever understands that soul can also understand the language of many things.

Paulo Coelho

#15. If I program 'ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it," Scile said. "If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it's only sound, and that's not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

China Mieville

#16. Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud, 'This blows ass.' She nods sympathetically. She doesn't understand, but of course, in her way she understands completely.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#17. Meaning is made in conversation, reality is created in communication, and knowledge is generated through social interaction ... Language is the vehicle through which we create our understanding of the world.

Diana Whitney

#18. What if it were true that nature speaks in signs and that the secret to understanding its language consists in noticing similarities in shape or in form?

Jeremy Narby

#19. Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.

Andres Neuman

#20. The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

Maria Montessori

#21. Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.

John Green

#22. As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good - I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Marcel Duchamp

#23. I myself am a supporter of multilingualism, but multilingualism without a true understanding of universal language will only make us blind and ultimately ineffectual in realizing that very ideal.

Minae Mizumura

#24. Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.

Molly Haskell

#25. If only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts.

Orson Scott Card

#26. It was fortunate that love did not need words; or else it would be full of misunderstanding and foolishness.

Hermann Hesse

#27. The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.

Steve Turner

#28. [About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

Niels Bohr

#29. I'm completely at ease on a set. I'm pretty comfortable most places, but hitting the mark and knowing set etiquette and understanding cameras and lenses are second nature. It's a language I've spoken for years.

Zoe Bell

#30. So our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

#31. Some scholars argue that although the brain might contain neural subsystems, or modules, specialized for tasks like recognizing faces and understanding language, it also contains a part that constitutes a person, a self: the chief executive of all the subsystems.

Paul Bloom

#32. Understanding Scripture in a language other than the heart language in which we think and experience emotion is like trying to eat soup with a fork. You can get a little taste, but you cannot get nourished.

William Cameron Townsend

#33. Computers are everywhere and you can't even begin to function with a computer unless you have comprehension and an understanding of the English language.

Wally Amos

#34. A healthy self and an empty self are not contradictory; it just appears so because we use the same language to describe two different things. The whole path of meditation is about understanding that the self as an unchanging entity is a fiction, an illusory mental construct.

Joseph Goldstein

#35. My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google.

Ray Kurzweil

#36. Light means knowledge in the Greek language it can also be translated as illumination, knowledge, insight, understanding and wisdom

Sunday Adelaja

#37. I have abused language. I love it, and I abuse it ... I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register.

Joss Whedon

#38. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.

Daniel Kahneman

#39. Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.
-Aunt Beast

Madeleine L'Engle

#40. 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

#41. As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

Dinaw Mengestu

#42. The main difference between writing JavaScript code like the average Joe (or Jill) and writing it like a JavaScript ninja is understanding JavaScript as a functional language.

Anonymous

#43. 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

#44. Man created language to be understood. It should be normal to understand what people convey to us. Fear, ulterior motives, and closed mindedness are the enemies of understanding.

John Fairclough

#45. 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

#46. Sitting at a crowded table with men who did not share a common language with you, listening to them talk and jape whilst understanding none of it, had quickly grown wearisome. Particularly since he always found himself wondering if the japes and laughter were directed at him.

George R R Martin

#47. Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#48. To the bachelor, the language of women is mystery. In those matters, a married man is already a scholar

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#49. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#50. The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on - these things obviously evolved.

Daniel Tammet

#51. Of all the languages that have existed upon the Earth, the Hebrew language is unique and extraordinary in its ability to paint vivid pictures with words that lodge within the heart conveying deep and profound Truth".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#52. Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.

Elise Boulding

#53. The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.

Anton Chekhov

#54. All languages were bestowed with a garland of wisdom and possess knowledge,understanding and instruction to reflect the beauty of a particular culture. No language is superior or inferior.

David Ssembajjo

#55. Language is inexorably tied to power and understanding. And power and understanding are the roots of magic. Just the act of writing something down is a magical act.

Patrick Rothfuss

#56. Understanding the language of eyes now came as naturally to him as swimming in the ocean came to a fish and flying in the sky to a bird!

Avijeet Das