Top 100 Quotes About Languages
#1. [Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.
Steven Levy
#2. 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
#3. Life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
Frank O'Hara
#4. I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what's encouraged is the invention of languages.
David Altmejd
#5. 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
#6. Gods were preserved but languages were exterminated: thus was the conqueror's will
Belcampo
#7. 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
#8. The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.
Roger Bacon
#9. 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
#10. If the goal you've set for yourself has a 100 percent chance of success, then frankly you aren't aiming high enough.
Benny Lewis
#11. If the humanities were science, the vocabularies of the world's languages would add up, not overlap.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#12. 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
#13. [There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.
Robert Charles Wilson
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. There is a risk of becoming linguistically schizophrenic. Because your brain is so fluent in both languages, it is fooled into thinking that the structure you have put together in the target language is correct merely because it is correct in the source language.
Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.
Edward Sapir
#20. Even if people are suspicious of the motives I think that learning and speaking two languages can only be a good thing for people.
Stephen Harper
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird ... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing
that's what counts.
Richard Feynman
#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. 'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'
Ursula K. Le Guin
#28. What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.
Grace Paley
#29. We all have different needs, thoughts, ideas, visions, languages, colors, and creeds, but we all want peace and happiness.
Debasish Mridha
#30. Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright.
Ben Aaronovitch
#31. Most of the languages that now exist are almost certain to become extinct within this century.
John McWhorter
#32. Language by its very nature is naive,we make it complex and naughty. We make it look and sound like what it is not.
Nahiyan Bin Asadullah
#33. Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things.
Mircea Eliade
#34. Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.
Jo Walton
#35. 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
#37. 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
#38. I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation.
Amisha Patel
#39. 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
#40. Shepherds know many mysterious languages; they speak the language of sheep and dogs, language of stars and skies, flowers and herbs.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#41. 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
#42. Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.
G. Willow Wilson
#43. 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
#44. Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.
Terry Pratchett
#45. Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.
Santino Hassell
#46. Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport.
Anton Chekhov
#47. We exchanged many frank words in our respective languages.
Peter Cook
#48. 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
#49. For economic safety for the future, you must have multiple skills and languages. Success is basically being the best that you can be.
Jim Rohn
#50. Luckily, languages are like musical instruments: the more you know, the easier it is to pick up new ones.
Patrick Rothfuss
#51. I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.
Bill Gates
#52. 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
#53. They have our bundles split open in museums / our dresses & shirts at auctions / our languages on tape / our stories in locked rare book libraries / our dances on film / The only part of us they can't steal / is what we know.
Chrystos
#54. 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
#55. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent.
Amos Oz
#56. And I learnt five new languages in the last three years"
"Only if you could for once understand the language of my eyes.
Sapan Saxena
#57. 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
#58. There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.
Yehuda Amichai
#59. But the Dutch speak four languages and smoke marijuana.
Eddie Izzard
#60. I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.
Bill Gates
#61. 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
#62. Film is one if three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.
Frank Capra
#63. Venti is twenty. Large is large. In fact, tall is large and grande is Spanish for large. Venti is the only one that doesn't mean large. It's also the only one that's Italian. Congratulations, you're stupid in three languages.
Paul Rudd
#64. 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
#65. At this point, scientists have identified over 300 specific genes that play a direct role in mental retardation. That link between genes and intelligence is pretty clear. However, scientists have not found a gene for A-level math ability or a gene for having a "natural ear for languages.
Hunter Maats
#66. Someone gave me the Love Languages book, and that has been the best book I've ever read about relationships and has helped me the most.
Kristin Cavallari
#67. The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don't require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do ... or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#68. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
Alan W. Watts
#69. The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#70. Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
George Santayana
#71. When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end.
Orhan Pamuk
#72. European languages must not be considered diamonds displayed under a glass ball, dazzling us with their brilliance.
Cheikh Anta Diop
#73. I've never been in any country for more than four years, and I'm learning different languages all the time. It gives you a different attitude.
Santiago Cabrera
#74. 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
#76. 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
#77. In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.
Gloria Steinem
#78. A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages.
Stuart Dybek
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Spain is a fascinating mix of people, languages, culture and food, but if there is one thing all Spaniards share, it's a love of food and drink.
Jose Andres
#83. I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine." "Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They're not so different languages, the two.
Donna Tartt
#85. Campingfahrt means not, as you might imagine, an unfortunate incident with Libby in a tent ... . It means "camping trip." I think I have a natural talent for languages.
Louise Rennison
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens. The citizens can go on speaking one language or six languages, or no languages if they so choose. Bilingualism is an imposition on the state and not the citizens.
Pierre Trudeau
#89. 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
#90. We can think of descriptions almost as computer languages, an operative description that only deals with very simple operations. Its code is sex - Male, female, dark, light, up down, in out - its the language of duality.
Frederick Lenz
#91. Singing in Hindi is nice but restrictive. Regional languages are more rhythmic, have a different tone and sound, making it more interesting.
Shreya Ghoshal
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.
Michael Gove
#95. Good buildings make and are made by their settings, and they are appropriately different in different locations. Climate, culture, topography and materials have helped create regional architectural languages that seem curiously right for their locations and for all times.
Jaquelin T. Robertson
#96. 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
#97. Three languages - the video, the music and the live performance - are awesome to bring together.
Planningtorock
#98. 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
#100. There is no such thing as a dead language, only a dead lay that's a little too quiet for my tastes.
Scott Jonathan Nixon
