Top 100 Quotes About Written Language
#1. 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
#2. I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.
James Frey
#3. Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access.
Carol Windley
#4. There were many markings in pencil, and those strange symbols again, dashed off, it seemed, revealing their opacity what a complex and abstract thing written language is.
Anne Rice
#5. I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.
Ian Smith
#6. Punctuation is the pragmatics of written language.
M.B. Parkes
#7. Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.
Gaston Bachelard
#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. Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution.
Jean Berko Gleason
#10. I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself.
Gabor Mate
#11. Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
Alfred North Whitehead
#12. Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?
Charlotte Bronte
#13. When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.
Maria Montessori
#14. Of all the weapons the Europeans brought to the Pacific, guns included, none was more powerful and more capable of effecting lasting change than written language.
Laurence Bergreen
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.
Edmund White
#18. When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.
Jamais Cascio
#19. He lives at Balbec? crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.
Marcel Proust
#20. Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.
Pete Hamill
#21. Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.
Charlton Laird
#23. 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
#24. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.
Henry David Thoreau
#25. I've made a dozen films in the English language. But then, for love, for my family and friends, I returned to Europe ... I annoyingly - looking back - turned down films like 007, 'For Your Eyes Only,' written specially for me.
Ornella Muti
#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. 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
#28. Emacs is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
Neal Stephenson
#29. So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
Vikram Seth
#30. Software development requires very little capital investment, since it is basically intellectual capital, pure thoughtstuff, expressed in a set of detailed instructions written in a language that machines can understand.
Brent Schlender
#31. 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
#32. The use of language around drugs is really important. So we find that it's increasingly difficult in our society to find the word "drug" not connected to the word "abuse." The notion of a responsible use of drugs is written out in the language of our culture.
Graham Hancock
#33. Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.
Jean Genet
#34. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
Robert M. Pirsig
#35. 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
#36. With 'True Grit,' the language was very specific, as is Shakespeare. You couldn't really improvise, nor would you really ever have to. I never felt the need to. It was all so beautifully written, and it was all right there.
Hailee Steinfeld
#37. While they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read.
Harold Bell Wright
#38. Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
Franz Kafka
#39. Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#40. If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over. Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.
Anthony Trollope
#41. Certainty' with respect to successful language learning and use--whether oral, written, or technologically mediated combinations--applies less and less to discrete products and more to adaptive processes.
Jay Jordan
#42. 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
#43. The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies - all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect
David Levithan
#44. For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
Virginia Woolf
#45. The laws of biology are written in the language of diversity.
E. O. Wilson
#46. I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.
Dean Koontz
#47. All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#48. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.
Harold Innis
#49. What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
Jacques Derrida
#50. It's vital to hear your own language, to see it written, to see it valued.
Louise Penny
#51. You may translate books of science exactly ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.
Samuel Johnson
#52. To understand the Universe, you must understand the language in which it's written, the language of Mathematics.
Galileo Galilei
#53. How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)
John Steinbeck
#54. To start speaking my language start reading what I read... start reading what I have written. Listen to what I have listened.
Deyth Banger
#55. I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.
William Jones
#56. The knowledge of your destiny is available to you, well before
it actually happens, as a message streaming continuously from
your heart to your brain, written in the language of longing.
Martha Beck
#57. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#58. As with ... even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life.
Bruce Berger
#59. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.
Claire-Louise Bennett
#60. He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.
Amy Tan
#61. At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow.
Neil Gaiman
#62. Words were written out for me phonetically. I learned to quack in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and German.
Clarence Nash
#63. What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
#64. Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks.
Jimmy Breslin
#65. 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
#66. Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.
Eric Allin Cornell
#67. Richard Burton had a tremendous passion for the English language, especially the spoken and written word
Frank Bough
#68. I've always had a fondness for language ... English. Not that I use it correctly but I like words. I like books and I like poetry.. I like the written word ... and the sung word.
Joel Plaskett
#69. A written discourse on any subject is bound to contain much that is fanciful.
Plato
#70. Do Not Disturb signs should be written in the language of the hotel maids.
Tim Bedore
#71. Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.
Steven Pinker
#72. Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes - I mean the universe - but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written
Galileo Galilei
#73. A returned love letter is written in the most violent language, by your own hand.
Jardine Libaire
#74. 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
#75. I just love language. I mean, I love it. I love stage directions. Any opportunity to write. I hadn't written in so long, I get very crazy and miserable. I - it's like not seeing my kids: I can't do it for very long.
Joss Whedon
#76. The fixation of the theater in one language
written words, music, lights, noises
betokens its imminent ruin.
Antonin Artaud
#77. I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: 'Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the
downtrodden of every race and language and color.'
Thaddeus Stevens
#78. Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
Robert Bringhurst
#79. I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it.
Bayard Taylor
#80. 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
#81. Lev Leokov was an open book. I only needed to discover the language in which his pages were written.
Belle Aurora
#82. 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
#83. Clary looked at Jace closely, trying to read his face. It was like a book written in a foreign language that she'd studies all too briefly.
Cassandra Clare
#84. Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's difficult. But I discovered that it's easy because it's so brilliantly written. The words are perfect, and the language is intelligent and very emotional.
Jessica Lange
#85. Lately, I feel like my life is a book written in a language I don't know how to read.
Brandon Sanderson
#86. 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
#87. The one thing I've always liked about that boy. As much as I hate his body language screaming he owns you, with him next to you ain't no one gonna mess with my little girl.It may as well be written on his chest in neon lights.
Elizabeth Reyes
#88. Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.
Alice Walker
#89. Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
#90. I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.
Stanley Elkin
#92. The mind is like a computer. It runs programs. Most of the software has been poorly written. It is written in the language of fear.
Frederick Lenz
#93. 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
#94. The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.
P. J. O'Rourke
#95. I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.
Matthea Harvey
#96. Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.
David Abram
#97. In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.
Susan Sontag
#98. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
#99. It was written in the ancient RUNIX spell-language, and is read-only and can't be modified.
Jasper Fforde
#100. It's like the man is an open book but whatever his story is just happens to be written in a different language.
J.M. Darhower
