Top 100 Quotes About The Language
#1. The gods speak to us, and irony is their language.
Tim W. Burke
#2. When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don't normally use hi-falutin' language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus.
Philipp Meyer
#3. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt?
Sherman Alexie
#4. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.
Sebastiao Salgado
#5. I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
Dennis Lehane
#6. I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.
Ciaran Carson
#7. Black-on black crime' is jargon, violence on language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#8. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.
Paul Auster
#9. On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
Andrew Dalby
#10. Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#11. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.
Slavoj Zizek
#12. When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.
Akshay Vasu
#13. The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
Steven Pinker
#14. Painting is ... a richer language than words ... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
Jean Dubuffet
#15. 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
#16. Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.
Anne Rice
#17. Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Erich Fromm
#18. On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.
Phil Collins
#19. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.
John Ruskin
#20. I could write pages and pages about the delights of being a full-time housewife and mother and trying to write and support a family with two babies - but I don't use that kind of language in public.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#21. Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don't speak English?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#22. I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet.That may be. But I think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vaccuum cleaners.
Jeff Stilson
#23. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.
Alan Siegel
#24. No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.
Theodore Bikel
#25. To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.
Rex Stout
#26. I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths, language, humor, its own loyalties and treacheries.
Jandy Nelson
#27. I haven't had any formal education. Through the grace of god, I am gifted in mathematics and the English language.
Shakuntala Devi
#28. That's what music did. It made you feel.
...
Music, her grandfather always told her, was language. A special language, a gift from the Muses, something all people are born understanding but few people can thoroughly translate.
Sara Zarr
#29. Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion ...
Benjamin Franklin
#30. Javier Chevanton don't speak the language too good.
Kevin Bond
#31. Touch is the most basic, the most nonconceptual form of communication that we have. In touch there are no language barriers; anything that can walk, fly, creep, crawl, or swim already speaks it.
Ina May Gaskin
#32. Once
God wrote a story
that shook the heaven to the very core.
Love was the only language used;
You and I
were the only characters.
Subhan Zein
#33. 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
#34. There is no such thing as a straight line, the sun does not go down, and it is time we updated our language. A more mesmerizing discourse I have never heard.
Amy C. Edmondson
#35. Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world.
Augustine Birrell
#36. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
Oscar Wilde
#37. One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#38. We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.
David Amram
#39. English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.
Paul Scott
#40. 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
#41. The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing.
Roger Babson
#42. If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur
Doug Larson
#43. The facts that make the world real
these depend on the unreal in order to be recognised by it.
Ingeborg Bachmann
#44. Now, mark it. This may be strong language, but heed it. The people mean it, and, my friends of the Eastern Democracy, we bid farewell when you do that thing.
Richard Parks Bland
#45. The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.
Robert Fitzgerald
#46. Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.
Mandy Patinkin
#47. In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.
Kathy Acker
#48. Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.
Alexander P. De Seversky
#49. What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.
Steven Pinker
#50. In my youth I regarded the Universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which, in our rare moments of grace, we are able to decipher a small fragment.
Arthur Koestler
#51. Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.
David Kyuman Kim
#52. There is a third truth, which only the mature lover will be able to hear. My spouse's criticisms about my behavior provide me with the clearest clue to her primary love language.
Gary Chapman
#53. The bible is not a religious experience for me. This book bundles together the entire culture of Judaism: our language, our history, our geography. God is merely a byproduct of the bible.
Tommy Lapid
#54. The central hypothesis of the theory is that language acquisition occurs in only one way: by understanding messages.
Stephen D. Krashen
#55. Nature is the common, universal language, understood by all.
Kathleen Raine
#56. I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
Christopher Hitchens
#57. What I want is for people to really grab hold of language and not be nervous about it. 'The Word Spy' is all about diving in and playing with words.
Ursula Dubosarsky
#58. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
Confucius
#59. Every rose is longing for joy and love; every rose know the language of the heart.
Debasish Mridha
#60. Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.
Juan Pablo Galavis
#61. Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.
Elizabeth McCracken
#62. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.
Mohsin Hamid
#63. I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives.
Steven Pinker
#64. The fans are bad everywhere you go, with language, and with behavior. You can't put enough cops in the stands, but you ought to give the cops cameras, give people cameras, so they can take a picture of the idiot and you can identify him.
John Chaney
#66. The right hemisphere controls sensory attention and body image; the left hemisphere controls skilled movements and some aspects of language.
Michio Kaku
#67. Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.
Erik Qualman
#68. It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.
Aravind Adiga
#69. The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.
Nancy Mitford
#70. Musicians can travel all over the world and have an audience, because there's no language barrier.
Tommy Chong
#71. The smartest people can write the worst emails and those of less intellect can write the best.
Paul Babicki
#72. Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.
Knut Hamsun
#73. Music is that universal language which unifies the spirits of mankind.
Paul Horn
#74. We always translate the other person's language into our own language.
Milton H. Erickson
#75. Don't you find it odd that two of the foremost symptoms of insanity are the hearing voices and talking to oneself? Is it any wonder that language is an area of such interest in psychology?
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
Mort W. Lumsden
#76. 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
#77. You don't actually have to understand the song to be emotionally moved and uplifted, whereas with language it becomes quirky and analytical.
Warwick Thornton
#78. All too often, when people don't know where they are, have jet lag, don't speak the language, and can't figure out the money or maintain intestinal regularity, they get hostile.
Mary-Lou Weisman
#79. The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
Marilyn Hacker
#80. All love songs, no matter how eloquent or crude, ornamented or plain, in whatever language they are sung, say essentially the same thing. All love stories have but one meaning.
Lee Siegel
#81. I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.
Bill Gates
#82. Burnside left even sooner, hard on the heels of a violent argument with Meade, an exchange of recriminations which a staff observer said went far toward confirming one's belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute.
Shelby Foote
#83. Magic is the mysteries into which not everyone is so lucky, or unlucky, as to be initiated. It can be affected by belief, the whims of the unseen, harsh language. And it is not. Supposed. To make. Sense. In fact, I think it's coolest when it doesn't.
N.K. Jemisin
#84. Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.
Guy Davenport
#85. It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.
Andrew Dalby
#86. Next to 'God', 'love' is the word most mangled in every language.
Richard Bach
#87. [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich
#88. Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
Thomas Carlyle
#89. In the Bengali language, there's not a real word for blow job. They call it "doing the ice cream."
Michael Glawogger
#90. All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.
Richard Foreman
#91. The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.
Don DeLillo
#92. 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
#93. It's a kind of liberation to break free in language, if you can break free, but it's also a confinement, because form confines you - whatever the form.
Gerald Stern
#94. Infatuation is the language of a beautiful eye upon a sensitive heart.
Joseph R. Bartlett
#95. English should not stoop to embrace the lowest common denominator. Rather, society should step up and grant the language the respect it deserves.
Terry Fallis
#96. The Catholic faith never changes. But the language and mode of manifesting this one faith can change according to peoples, times and places.
Francis Arinze
#97. Language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.
Kato Lomb
#98. 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
#99. Compassion is for the very strong. Compassion does not come to the weak. People who are unkind, bullies, use rude language, are not strong people. They are very weak people.
Harbhajan Singh Yogi
#100. At all periods of the [English] language it is difficult to assign a beginning date to most new words and meanings. They tend to slip into the language silently, and are placed in date order only when scholars subsequently get to work.
Robert Burchfield
