Quotes About Languages

#1. And not only that but ... when the station is completed, there will be an international crew made of astronauts coming from different cultural experiences, speaking different languages, but working together for a common goal.

Umberto Guidoni

#2. Robert Heinlein says in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel that the only things worth studying are history, languages, and science. Actually, he adds maths, but honestly they left out the mathematical part of my brain.

Jo Walton

#3. About the Author Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages.

Anonymous

#4. If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.

Guido Van Rossum

#5. Music is all about transporting people; speaking a language which languages fail to express.

A.R. Rahman

#6. Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

Larry Wall

#7. I sing in Hungarian. I read Hungarian. I do not pretend to speak Hungarian, but I sing in languages that I have studied as languages. And I find that to be central and very, very helpful. I think if you're not really cognizant of what every single word means, I think that might be a little tricky.

Jessye Norman

#8. Bryson says that "we tend to regard other people's languages as we regard their cultures - with ill-hidden disdain." Too true. Unfortunately, Bryson proves himself right with a series of stories that should have set off his own too-bizarre-to-be-true detector.

Robert Lane Greene

#9. Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

Larry Wall

#10. Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together

Clyde Kluckhohn

#11. I love commuting between languages just like I love commuting between cultures and cities.

Elif Safak

#12. Fantasizing is one of the earliest languages in the child's mind. We are in touch with our imagination and dreams before we engage with logic and reason.

Caroline Myss

#13. Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.

Helder Camara

#14. Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.

Ferdinand De Saussure

#15. Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages.

Minae Mizumura

#16. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Gregory Maguire

#17. Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.

Joshua Foer

#18. by 1900, the tribes owned less than 2 percent of the land they once possessed. Entire languages had already disappeared - more than a loss of words, a loss of a way to look at the world.

Timothy Egan

#19. You was in all sorts of places, huh?" "Yeah, I was. Saw the world." "What'd you think of it?" "Different languages, same shit.

Dennis Lehane

#20. I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and ... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic.

Cote De Pablo

#21. If you know two languages, the level of your intelligence
is multiplied a hundredfold in other people's eyes.

Bill Cosby

#22. The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a

Lyndsay Faye

#23. With the computer and programming languages, mathematics has newly-acquired tools, and its notation should be reviewed in the light of them. The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable "native speaker" of mathematical notation.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#24. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#25. The record of his life and teaching, the Gospels, have impacted the world so much that they have been translated into 2,527 languages. The second-most-translated book, Don Quixote, has been translated into about 60 languages. The

John Ortberg

#26. They have courses teaching you foreign languages and ballroom dancing and etiquette and cooking. But there are no classes to learn how to be by yourself in a furnished room with chipped dishes, or how to be alone in general without any words of concern or familiar sounds.

Irmgard Keun

#27. New York is a great city. There is no question of that. It's such a diverse city. I've walked down the city and heard four or five different languages simultaneously. I think that's beautiful.

Patti Smith

#28. I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

Harry Mathews

#29. We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Alan W. Watts

#30. I would love to learn other languages, maybe French? My uncle speaks German so maybe also German? Chinese seems to be too difficult.

Rafael Nadal

#31. National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.

Edward Sapir

#32. Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

Joshua Foer

#33. Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

#34. It became the country's official language in the 13th century under the reign of Alfonso X el Sabio (the wise one) as he tried to unify a country that was housing a number of languages, including arabic, hebrew and latin.

Pilar Orti

#35. No matter what town you are in, there is some social order and a different yardstick to chart. In New York, people create things like schools and speaking languages and second homes.

Jill Kargman

#36. Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages.

Rob Pike

#37. From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

#38. The gospel of the glory of Christ spreads better and flourishes more because of 6,500 languages, not in spite of them.

John Piper

#39. It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case."

Sydney J. Harris

#40. I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it's really a sign of affection, but I don't see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain.

Erik Naggum

#41. He was not like Greek fathers. He didn't tell us to get married. My father thought it was very important that we travel, learn languages, be educated.

Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki

#42. And at the end of the day, there was an attempt to suppress a book. The book wasn't suppressed. It's freely available in whatever it is, close to 50 languages. There was an attempt to suppress the writer. And I'm happy to say the writer wasn't suppressed.

Salman Rushdie

#43. When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we own them, we are revolutionaries.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#44. Put in the bluntest possible terms, what I discovered was that the U.S. secret intelligence community was collecting only information it considered secret, while ignoring the eighty to ninety percent of the information in the world, in all languages, that was not secret.

Robert David Steele

#45. People who speak the same language can hate one another as easily as can people who speak unrelated languages.

Peter Farb

#46. Because there'd be two languages I couldn't speak, French and English.

Casey Stengel

#47. God speaks all languages - including yours. What language is God speaking to you?

Max Lucado

#48. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#49. Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.

Steven Heller

#50. Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.

Arthur Miller

#51. Philosophy is the abstract art of thoughts and perceptions that form colors of words and languages that paint the canvas of our minds.

Debasish Mridha

#52. I feel growing up in Mumbai is an advantage, as we grow up speaking so many languages that when we go abroad, it becomes easier to learn new languages.

Zubin Mehta

#53. There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts.

China Mieville

#54. The cultures of the Americas were extremely complex and interesting, with their own languages and observatories to watch the stars. The more you know about them the more you realize how extremely impressive they were. Bloodthirsty, though, I think they were as well.

Michelle Stuart

#55. Translators need a lot of skills besides fluency in at least two languages; translators need to be excellent writers in their native language and need to be interested in and skilled at terminology research using both paper dictionaries and the Internet.

Corinne McKay

#56. One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.

Francis Crick

#57. The imprecision in the way languages express time is related to the imprecision in the way we experience and remember it. Though no one experiences time as coarsely as the handful of distinctions in a tense system would suggest, we don't live by a mental stopwatch either.

Steven Pinker

#58. Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages ... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on ... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

Umberto Eco

#59. There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful
many more.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#60. I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.

Stephen Colbert

#61. Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.

Guido Van Rossum

#62. Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Culture are transient.

Oswald Spengler

#63. After using four different languages on an album, it's tough to decide which one I'm gonna actually learn to speak. I always study the lyric, make sure I know what I'm singing, and try to get the pronunciation as perfect as possible.

Josh Groban

#64. As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.

Nataly Kelly

#65. English you're speaking," Matheus said. "The language that sidles up to other languages in dark alleys, mugs them, then rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary. It's the bitch-whore of languages and it owns the world. Suck on that, Rome boy.

Amy Fecteau

#66. It's like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with.

William Wiley

#67. I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

Maya Angelou

#68. Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words.

W. H. Auden

#69. My view is that knowing languages is part of the process of becoming a cultured person.

Kato Lomb

#70. If there's any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

#71. Just as dogs often come to resemble their owners, it seems that programming languages end up reflecting the temperaments and personalities of their creators in some subtle ways,

Nick Parish

#72. The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English.

Melvyn Bragg

#73. Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

Benjamin Whorf

#74. I can speak English. I can speak Hindi. I can understand one or two other languages.

Azim Premji

#75. 1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas,

Jared Diamond

#76. No scheme of self-government, however benevolently or generously it may be bestowed upon us, will ever make us a self-governing nation, if we have no respect for the languages our mothers speak.

Mahatma Gandhi

#77. Gemma had blond hair and blue eyes. I did not.
Gemma was always an A student. I was more of a B-all-you-can-be kind of gal.
When Gemma was into science, I was into skipping.
When Gemma was into foreign languages, I was into the hot Italian guy down the street.

Darynda Jones

#78. India was the motherland of our race
and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages.
India was the mother of our philosophy,
of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in
Christianity ... of self-government and democracy.
In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all.

Will Durant

#79. You have to list all your special skills on a form when you get an agent. There's fencing, stage combat, horse riding, motorbike riding, Spanish, French, German, whatever. I just ticked everything. I talk about 10 languages according to that form. I even ticked the extreme sports box.

Isla Fisher

#80. The word for 'book' in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, 'chamber of words' ...

Sofia Samatar

#81. Plurality of languages: [ ... ] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.

Hannah Arendt

#82. It's nice to represent to other people in the world that Americans actually do know what's happening in the world, can speak other languages and are conscientious. The perception quite often is that we don't know what's beyond our county line.

Cary Fukunaga

#83. We sit in silence and watch the stars, I suppose because there are no words, not in all the languages on earth, that can properly describe the feeling of being in love. And perhaps those little burning lights out there in the dark, are the closest we come to something that does.

Beau Taplin

#84. I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.

Aravind Adiga

#85. Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#86. In antiquity, there were three regions in southern Europe: Greece, Rome, and Ilyria. Albanian is the only survivor of the Ilyrian languages. That is why it has always intrigued the great linguists of the past.

Ismail Kadare

#87. Holy" in both biblical languages means separated and set apart for God, consecrated and made over to Him.

J.I. Packer

#88. These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages.

Edward Sapir

#89. I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

Clive James

#90. Then Kyler kissed me, and I stopped thinking about words and languages, because there was nothing beyond how smooth and firm his lips felt against mine.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#91. He was dancing to some music No one else had ever heard He'd speak in unknown languages She would translate every word And then when the world was laughing At his castles in the sky She'd hold him in her body Till he once again could fly.

Harry Chapin

#92. In difficult times, people just like to hear music. They like to be moved by what they hear. And music speaks different languages.

Itzhak Perlman

#93. Languages are the keys of science.

Jean De La Bruyere

#94. It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one.

Arthur Helps

#95. Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.

Jean De La Bruyere

#96. By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.

Miguel De Cervantes

#97. Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#98. Different nations... different main languages... But in the end they are "="... both as characters are fucking ignorant.

Deyth Banger

#99. Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#100. Talk to yourself in two languages - what do I fear and what do I love - in order to balance the body and the soul.

Peter Shepherd