Top 100 Quotes About Spoken Language
#1. Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.
Leonard Mlodinow
#2. Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection.
Richard Leakey
#3. The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.
Jane Goodall
#4. Sometimes there are hurts so deep that they exist in a country that has no spoken language, a place where all landscapes are blighted and no sun ever shines.
Jonathan Maberry
#5. The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules.
Judith Martin
#6. Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.
Carl Sagan
#7. What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.
Jane Goodall
#8. Phonocentrism places higher value on spoken language as being more primary than and thus superior to written language, which it conceives as necessarily corrupting the original Subject - the center of meaning.
Minae Mizumura
#9. Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word.
Timothy Noah
#10. I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
Antonin Artaud
#11. It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
Lafcadio Hearn
#12. In absolute incommunicableness it stood apart, a thought, a system of thought which as yet had no symbol in spoken language
Fitz Hugh Ludlow
#13. However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.
Henry David Thoreau
#14. The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.
John Muir
#15. Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?
Swami Vivekananda
#16. I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.
Jane Goodall
#17. Words have a force far beyond that of ink stains on pages or spoken sounds... Whether written or spoken, language found in forbidden books can warp space-time and tear the fabric of reality.
Daniel Harms
#19. Sometimes there aren't words, Benny knew. Sometimes there are hurts so deep that they exist in a country that has no spoken language, a place where all landscapes are blighted and no sun ever shines. Benny had left his footprints in the dust of that place.
Jonathan Maberry
#20. A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.
John Berger
#21. In my country, terawatt globes are reserved for police helicopter chases and warning sailors of hazardous shoals. This is despite the fact that practically every living creature there can kill you in under three minutes. Our primary spoken language is screaming.
David Thorne
#22. Photography is light-writing, the language of images. Less abstract than written or spoken language, it selects images from the existing world of appearances and arranges them in patterns. The camera-eye doesn't think, it recognizes. It shows us what we already know, but don't know that we know.
David Levi Strauss
#23. The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.
Paulo Freire
#24. Once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed and breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, 'Be whole,' and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.
Neil Gaiman
#25. I hate that word, CAN'T. I wish it had never been dreamed
up, spoken, or defined. I wish the concept of CAN'T could be
eradicated not only from language, but more importantly from
the psyche of a girl who I know is filled with so much CAN it seeps out of her pores and scents the air.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#26. There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
Eugene H. Peterson
#27. There's something about studying body language and non-spoken emotion - I know the innate response. But to really study it like a science would be fun.
Shia Labeouf
#28. An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. "I am a soldier." I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy's own Dejagoran dialect. "I've been distracted before. I'm still alive.
Glen Cook
#29. It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out.
George Mikes
#30. From her dubious tone alone, I could see how Karin had no idea how terrifying words spoken quietly could be. How words chosen precisely to wreak maximum damage ticked like a bomb in your head, but exploded in your heart hours later, leaving you scarred and changed.
Justina Chen
#31. The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
Adam Gopnik
#32. The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought
Albert Einstein
#33. 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
#34. Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
Edmund Morgan
#35. Romans themselves never read silently, but always aloud; they regarded language as speaking and listening, and viewed writing as merely a convenient means of recording communications spoken and heard.
Anonymous
#36. They (Americans) have their national game, baseball - which is cricket played with a strong American accent - and they have a national language, entirely their own, unlike any other language spoken on the earth.
George Mikes
#37. It is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.
Gertrude Stein
#38. Have you ever noticed how some rooms exude a certain energy, warmth, and a harmony of spirit? If you have, then you have experienced the language of the home. A language softly spoken, and univerally understood.
Charlotte Moss
#39. Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
Eric Hoffer
#40. From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.
Noam Chomsky
#41. With our bodies we make statements before we speak, our presentation is a language spoken without words. You - and only you - get to decide what it is you're trying to say.
Hannah Hart
#42. Psycho-babble is that language spoken by sailors who have become so interested in navigating their way around their boat that they have forgotten to read the stars and sea. They may be able to get from the galley to the head but will be lost in their journey from point to port.
Rich Mullins
#43. Hear this if you can:
If you want to reach him
You have to go beyond yourself
And when you finally arrive at the land of absence
Be silent
Don't say a thing
Ecstasy, not words, is the language spoken there
Rumi
#44. The loudest
Of all languages
Is also the most
Silent of all languages
And that is the language
Spoken by tears...
Chase Von
#45. The language of love is the only language understood but not spoken the world over.
Amit Abraham
#46. Love is the language of the heart. It can feel the movements of every atom and understand every language spoken or unspoken.
Debasish Mridha
#47. Spanish - how shall I say this? - is like
Portuguese spoken with a speech impediment.
Sol Luckman
#48. All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#49. Saint Francis of Assisi understood the power of faith put into action to change the human heart, for it was he who said, "Preach the gospel always; when necessary use words." We had not yet spoken a word in their language, but the village elders had already "heard" the gospel.
Richard Stearns
#50. Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.
John McWhorter
#51. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#52. I'm a first-time father, and it was amazing to me to learn that my son could actually use sign language before the spoken word. I could see this intelligence in his eyes before he could speak: how he could understand what was going on around him and was frustrated by that.
Matt Reeves
#53. Just remember, the language of gesture is more effective than the spoken word. Body language is very powerful. Bring the balance within you and project that balance.
Harbhajan Singh Yogi
#54. Words were torn from him. Ones he'd never spoken, in a language long since extinct, but only they could truly convey what she was to him, how much she meant.
Eternity wouldn't be enough...
Setta Jay
#55. 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
#56. I loved England's gentility and its civility. I'm from the Bronx, with a Bronx accent. I love the beauty of its language, the ways it's spoken. I love the green grass of England and the flowers.
Sid Bernstein
#57. Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
John McWhorter
#59. When you do not understand the language being spoken, you have too options. You can struggle against the isolation, or you can give yourself up to it.
Jodi Picoult
#60. I've spoken with a few employers who have moved away from what has to be some of the least attractive language you could use about health risk to start talking about wellbeing.
Tom Rath
#61. I'm Sorry are two of the most powerful words in our language, especially when they are not flipped blithely over the shoulder but spoken from the heart. They help restore order, balance, harmony. They reduce pain. They heal broken friendship. If they were medecine, they'd be called a miracle.
Jerry Spinelli
#62. 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
#63. I think the language as spoken in Limerick and Cork has not really been written; 'City of Bohane' is a combination of the two. Bohane is a little kingdom. When I began writing it, I realised that it was in the future and that it was a place that didn't care about anything that happened outside it.
Kevin Barry
#64. And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: "Our language," she said, "is not spoken, but sung ... Not simply words ... and grammar ... but melody. It was hard ... thus ... to learn English ... this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.
M T Anderson
#65. Richard Burton had a tremendous passion for the English language, especially the spoken and written word
Frank Bough
#66. Sometimes during solitude I hear truth spoken with clarity and freshness; uncolored and untranslated it speaks from within myself in a language original but inarticulate, heard only with the soul, and I realize I brought it with me, was never taught it nor can I efficiently teach it to another.
Hugh B. Brown
#67. That is the foremost fundamental law: language has the power to create reality. When spoken, a thing exists.
Claudia Serrano
#68. It is only when the mirror has not spoken to Chimpanzee in a plain language that it thinks it looks more better than the Gorilla
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#69. The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#70. Command of English, spoken or written, ranks at the top in business. Our main product is words, so a knowledge of their meaning and spelling and pronunciation is imperative. If a man knows the language well, he can find out about all else.
William Feather
#71. Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.
John Dewey
#72. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything.
Neil Gaiman
#73. The audience I'm targeting doesn't care about the language spoken in the films they watch. They're interested in more important things like story, performance, cinematography etc.
Chika Anadu
#74. It is time to put down the pen; time to clear the throat. Speaking is a different thing altogether from writing. The spoken word has different properties, and different powers. If I have learned anything from writing down my own tale, it is this.
Dexter Palmer
#75. The English language was spoken and written - but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air - it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were - who knew?
Simon Winchester
#76. There were words for what he meant to me, but if I studied every language ever spoken for the next thousand years, I still wouldn't find enough of them to describe it.
Jeaniene Frost
#77. There are tines in the prophetic ministry when words we receive for others must stay in the throne room...they are more powerful when converted into crafted prayer and spoken to the father than when put into prophetic language and ministered to human beings.
Graham Cooke
#78. My language! heavens!I am the best of them that speak this speech. Were I but where 'tis spoken.
William Shakespeare
#79. For a woman, language spoken is an expression of what she is feeling. For a man, language spoken is an expression of what he is thinking. A woman says what is on her heart while a man says what is on his mind.
Myles Munroe
#80. Better than chanting a thousand words in a dead language is one soothing word spoken in the vernacular.
Gautama Buddha
#81. Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German.
Anne Frank
#82. The spoken form is in fact a very restrained representation of what is possible in the musical language.
Robert Fripp
#83. In the simplest language, spoken without a single word between out two bodies.
Cara McKenna
#84. Theologians sometimes have spoken of the "impassibility of God;" namely that God could not be capable of emotions, of either joy and pleasure or pain and grief.237 But this goes beyond the language and teaching of the Scripture.
Timothy J. Keller
#85. The rising and falling cadence of words, carried on the wind, spoken in a language other than human.
Megan Shepherd
#86. Love your country. Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart, blushing, whispered the first word of love; it is the home that God has given you that by striving to perfect yourselves therein you may prepare to ascend to him.
Giuseppe Mazzini
#87. The Pharisees deliberately avoided the Late form of Biblical Hebrew (LBH), which is the language of the Bible written after the exile, presenting their teaching in the language of the spoken vernacular.
Angel Saenz-Badillos
#88. HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.
NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.
George Bernard Shaw
#90. The known world shrinks and vanishes, and the soul hurls itself into the uncharted distances of the unknown where everything is strange and yet familiar, and the language of music, of poets, and of dreams is spoken.
Hermann Hesse
#91. Through language, we can tell the truth and hear the truth spoken, just as we can be deceived. Sometimes it's a painful realization: we can be lied to. As I write, I think of myself as putting my eye under oath, so that what I write is the truth about my characters.
Michael Cadnum
#92. Energy is the language spoken by your body. You probably already know that your brain sends bioelectric signals to your organs and muscles through the nerve pathways in your body. But did you ever consider how your brain talks to your cells?
Ilchi Lee
#93. I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.
Bertrand Russell
#94. To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.
Spyridon Marinatos
#95. Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.
Marilyn Vos Savant
#96. But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright.
Bob Goff
#97. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message - spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions - telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.
Naomi Klein
#98. As the chant grew in volume she began to be conscious of the terrible potency of language, the sense that a name spoken is a summons and more than a summons, an act of creation, for a word shapes an idea, an idea shapes belief, and belief shapes the world.
Jan Siegel
#99. When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!
William Halsey
#100. 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
