Top 58 Quotes About The Mother Tongue
#1. God in His infinite wisdom blessed humans with redundant tongues: one to outfit the mouth for speech. And a mother tongue to give it meaning ... Though it wags out such inconceivable beauty, attached to the mother tongue lies one much maligned woman.
David B. Lentz
#2. When I was in south Sudan, people used to rap in my village. But the rapping was more in the mother tongue, Nuer.
Emmanuel Jal
#3. Though Urdu is the mother tongue of only 5 percent of Pakistanis, it is the official language of the state and is taught in schools nationwide.
Dilip Hiro
#4. The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner.
William Cameron Townsend
#5. A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.
Garry Kasparov
#6. Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.
Peter Farb
#7. Humankind, with its long history, is by now a corpse bound to a tree with the ropes of convention. If the ropes were cut, the corpse would simply fall to the ground. Prayer in one's mother tongue is a manifestation of that pathetic state."
-from "A Prayer in the Mother Tongue
Yasunari Kawabata
#9. I recognize but one mental acquisition as a necessary part of the education of a lady or gentlemen, namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.
Charles William Eliot
#10. The mother tongue of politicians is that of ancient Babylon: a language designed to severely limit discourse within a tower of praise to elitism, a language carried on breath's reeking of the fecal matter from their paymasters
Dean Cavanagh
#11. They call our language the mother tongue because the father seldom gets to speak.
George W. Bush
#13. A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians..
Garry Kasparov
#14. German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it's almost like a meeting.
Franz Kafka
#15. There is much to be learned from the world around us - far more than we normally comprehend. The Ancient Ones knew this well - most particularly the wise teachers among them - those who, in the Navajo tongue, were called "Anasazi.
Anasazi Foundation
#16. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, - Listen and do not hear - the tongue moves but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me - that I let Him have free hand.
Mother Teresa
#17. If the English educated neglect, as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of their mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.
Mahatma Gandhi
#18. Cementerio El Encinal meant Cemetery of Many Oaks (I'm taking Spanish so that when Jesse and I have kids, I'll understand what he's saying when he yells at them in his mother tongue).
Meg Cabot
#19. The rhythm of my body is the same as my mother tongue. It is in this rhythm where I find sanctity, that I can return to my mother who is everywhere in the universe.
Kim Hyesoon
#20. I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.
Peter Hoeg
#21. For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.
Philip Sidney
#22. Meg was all natural. She didn't wear a lot of makeup, but her skin was so smooth, dotted with angel kisses, as his mother called freckles. He wanted to trace those freckles with his tongue, kiss each one and see if they covered her whole body or only parts kissed by the sun.
Tamara Hoffa
#23. Evangelicalism is like my religious mother tongue. I revert to it whenever I'm angry or excited or surrounded by other people who understand what I'm saying. And it's the language in which I most often hear God's voice on the rare occasion that it rises above the noise.
Rachel Held Evans
#24. If your Eyes are Positive, You will Love the World.
But if Your Tongue is Positive, The World will Love you.
Mother Teresa
#25. Musical ability is not an inborn talent but an ability which can be developed. Any child who is properly trained can develop musical ability just as all children develop the ability to speak their mother tongue. The potential of every child is unlimited.
Shinichi Suzuki
#26. See that your children are properly educated in the rudiments of their mother tongue, and then let them proceed to higher branches of learning..
Brigham Young
#27. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.
Henry David Thoreau
#29. In Wangechi Mutu's mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for "artist." The closest term is something like "magician" or "a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,
Sarah Thornton
#30. A lot of really big trees had died to make that desk. His mother had probably gnawed them down, used her nails to saw the boards, and finished the decorative cutwork with her tongue.
Jennifer Crusie
#31. A strong tie binds novelists to their mother tongue. Though novelists can and do write in languages other than their own, there is a common belief that a novel has a special, almost mystical affinity with the novelist's mother tongue.
Minae Mizumura
#32. Foreign languages was the only thing that interested me when I was at school, so playing in another language ... it is quite demanding because if it is not your mother tongue, you are missing some connotations and some emotional depth of certain things.
Tom Wlaschiha
#33. I'm at the age when my friends have started having kids, and when my first good friend had a baby, the first time I picked up her daughter I spoke in French. I didn't even think about it. It just came out. Maybe it's because it's my mother tongue?
Jessica Pare
#34. I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.
William Tyndale
#35. Symptoms are the body's mother tongue; signs are in a foreign language.
John Brown
#36. The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.
Amin Maalouf
#37. I am staring into the hissing face of a cobra. A surprisingly pink tongue slithers in and out of a cruel mouth while an Indian man whose eyes are the blue of blindless inclines his head towards my mother and explains in Hindi that cobras make very good eating.
Libba Bray
#38. It's okay to be proud of your good English. But don't be proud of being poor at your Mother tongue. Only the scum of the earth do that.
Manasa Rao
#39. Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.
David Kyuman Kim
#40. I would have saved them. But the lie tastes rotten on my tongue. Would anything have held William from me? Would anything have held my mother back. Anything? All bonds can be slipped, all thorns torn free. It's simply a matter of pain, and of what you're prepared to lose.
Mark Lawrence
#41. But that's the function I expect of you, cousin. It's why I chose you. I'll make it official. I will give you a new name. From this moment, you'll be called Breaking of the Habit, which in our tongue is Harq al-Ada. Come, cousin, don't be obtuse. My mother taught you well. Give me your Sardaukar.
Frank Herbert
#42. I was thinking of murder, mutilation and dessert like Ignacia Sandoval's instructions for delectable empanadas made of minced mother-in-law's tongue (said to induce peace and harmony in your household), or the gonads of your cheating husband (a savory dish to add spice to your lovemaking).
Sandra Ramos O'Briant
#43. Welsh is my mother tongue, and my children speak it. If you come and live in this community you'll work out pretty quickly that it's beneficial to learn the language, because if you're going to the pub or a cafe you need to be a part of the local life.
Bryn Terfel
#44. "What Thou wilt, when Thou wilt, how Thou wilt." I had rather speak these three sentences from my heart in my mother tongue than be master of all the languages in Europe.
John Newton
#45. To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.
Rachel Cusk
#46. The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
Marshall McLuhan
#47. My tongue was handed down to me
by datus and katipuneros. The truth is
my mouth is a battlefield that
you wouldn't know how to fight in.
Danabelle Gutierrez
#48. Every person of intelligence should be able to use his mother tongue correctly. It only requires a little pains, a little care, a little study to enable one to do so, and the recompense is great.
Joseph Devlin
#49. I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.
Susan Griffin
#50. My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would say 'the sky rolled over and changed its sides.'
Ishmael Beah
#51. Gankis lifted an arm to point at the distant shale cliffs. "And in the face of it there were thousands of little holes, little what-you-call-'ems ... "
"Alcoves," Kennit supplied in an almost dreamy voice. "I call them alcoves, Gankis. As would you, if you could speak your own mother tongue.
Robin Hobb
#53. I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor.
Max Von Sydow
#54. Mothers are the only race of people that speak the same tongue. A mother in Manchuria could converse with a mother in Nebraska and never miss a word.
Will Rogers
#55. Rhythm is our universal mother tongue. It's the language of the soul.
Gabrielle Roth
#56. I remained completely conscious of Jeremiah. He smelled good. He looked good. He sounded good. And when he ran his tongue across the salt on that place between his index finger and his thumb, I wanted to be that little spot. -from chapter Lick, Drink, Suck!, The Boots My Mother Gave Me
Brooklyn James
#57. A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
W. H. Auden
#58. An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art.
The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.
Louis Sullivan
