Top 100 Speech Language Quotes
#1. A speech-language pathologist named Michelle Garcia Winner told me that many parents in her practice became aware of their own autistic traits only in the wake of their child's diagnosis.
Steve Silberman
#2. There are 80 jobs in which women earn more than men - positions like financial analyst, speech-language pathologist, radiation therapist, library worker, biological technician, motion picture projectionist.
Warren Farrell
#3. Cadence, n.
I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I'm talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Suthern truncation, and I know it's because I'm swimming in your cadences, that you penetrate my very language.
David Levithan
#4. He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence - of talking without meaning - is never effaced.
Henry Adams
#5. Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
Roland Barthes
#7. 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
#8. Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.
Henry Sweet
#9. Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
Grace Paley
#10. You follow words of the toga (language of the cultivated class).
[Lat., Verba togae sequeris.]
Aulus Persius Flaccus
#11. True love was a language, so many looks, touches and one word references that told the other more than full sentences of paragraphs, more than full outpourings of speech.
Our language was extensive and beautiful, and over a joyful lifetime together, we stayed fluent in it.
R.K. Lilley
#12. In classes, the more lively and uninhibited ones will "suck away the air" from those with a more passive nature, despite all the efforts of the teacher. It is also a special danger in large groups that you will hear your fellow students' bad pronunciation more than the teacher's perfected speech.
Kato Lomb
#13. ...language is sacred. It has glory, even in ordinary speech. The way most people use it, it's like a winged horse pulling a junk wagon.
Robert K. Tanenbaum
#14. I have struggled all my life with my stuttering. Not to mention all my other speech impediments. I think I have every language disorder known to speech pathologists.
Kate Forsyth
#15. Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
June Jordan
#16. They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
Rebecca Solnit
#18. I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former
Ben Lerner
#19. It definitely sharpened my interest in language, the way people used language, slang words, speech patterns. There's a big advantage to being the outsider.
Amy Heckerling
#20. The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#21. An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
Thomas Mann
#22. Russian is such a tough and complex language that I am happy enough to understand everything and read most things pretty well, but, without constant practice, my speech is not what I wish it was, and I would sooner write in crayon than write a letter in Russian.
David Remnick
#23. All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#24. What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
Jacques Derrida
#25. Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks.
Raymond Moody
#26. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...
Julio Cortazar
#27. No. See, when you throw up you're vomiting, but when you throw down you're starting a fight, as in throwing down the gauntlet."
"Ohhhh," he said. "I thought you were speaking literally."
"I do beg your pardon. Let's literally throw up, but figuratively throw down.
Kevin Hearne
#28. {28:11} For with the speech of lips and with a different language, he will speak to this people. {28:12}
The Biblescript
#29. Language patterns solidify at 10, 11, 12, so I was able to learn English fairly easily, with no accent. I didn't do speech or vocal work to get rid of the German accent; I was just lucky.
Peter Hermann
#30. Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
William Penn
#31. Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God.
Noah Webster
#33. I don't like jokes in speeches. I do like wit and humor. A joke is to humor what pornography is to erotic language in a good novel.
James C. Humes
#34. Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Margaret Atwood
#35. They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow. The dumb have a lonely grandeur like Nature's own. Wherefore
Rabindranath Tagore
#36. Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.
Edward Hirsch
#37. 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
#38. I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Howard Nemerov
#39. Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.
Charles Caleb Colton
#40. The English Language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever.
Joss Whedon
#41. Some of the most healing words in any language are, "I'm sorry. Will you forgive me?" How much more we need that confession to our Father in heaven.
Billy Graham
#42. It is hard to say anything as true as saying nothing.
Marty Rubin
#43. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.
Judith Butler
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.
Aristotle.
#47. A handful of the senior officers listening to the speech disapproved of Patton's coarse language. Patton could not care less. He believes that profanity is the language of the soldier, and that to speak to soldiers one must use words that will have the most impact.
Bill O'Reilly
#48. For Milady was well aware that her most seductive power was in her voice, which could run skilfully through the whole scale of tones, from mortal speech, upwards to the language of heaven.
Alexandre Dumas
#49. Words travel as swiftly as desire, so it is possible to send a message of love without them.
Laura Esquivel
#50. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go out and greet those wonderful creatures and say a few nice words in a language invented by Tolkein. I've practiced, but I sound like Chewbacca making a New Year's speech.
Nina George
#51. We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech
William Carlos Williams
#52. It's a daily miracle to see a child grow and develop all the senses and language and speech and faculties, and they're so much fun and they're so delightful and they're so innocent. It just stops your heart every time; I can't get enough of it.
Jann Wenner
#53. My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn't be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole.
Ted Chiang
#54. Who of English speech, bred to the traditions of his race, does not recognize Hamlet in his 'inky cloak' at a glance? Not to know him would argue one's self untaught in the chief glories of his language.
George Edward Woodberry
#55. It is only through the radical defile of speech that we fall into the illusion that language is a register of conscious construction
Lacan Jacques
#56. Silence is the only language of the realized. Practice moderation in speech.
Sathya Sai Baba
#57. In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.
Diane Setterfield
#58. Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape ... if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.
Arthur Quinn
#59. The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.
John Wesley Powell
#60. Body language, when you know how to read it, can be more expressive than speech. (Mercy)
Patricia Briggs
#61. If you want your style to be energetic and lively, take the most direct route and use the most energetic and lively part of speech in the English language: verbs.
Stephen Wilbers
#62. Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.
Bela Lugosi
#63. Silence is never-ending speech. Vocal speech obstructs the other speech of silence. In silence one is in intimate contact with the surroundings. Language is only a medium for communicating one's thoughts to another. Silence is ever speaking.
Ramana Maharshi
#64. I've always felt, even as a songwriter, that the rhythm of speech is in itself a language for me.
Cyndi Lauper
#65. I want to give a beautiful speech at the end of the world - a rousing and inspiring collection of thoughts expressed eloquently through a dying language that is ultimately too little too late; absurd and utterly meaningless - almost insulting as life burns away.
Jonathan Douglas Duran
#66. I should think a dead language would be rather boring, socially
speaking.
Sol Luckman
#67. Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.
Jasper Fforde
#69. That your power of command
with simple language was
one of the magnificent things of
our century.
(from the poem: result)
Charles Bukowski
#70. He that would speak Divine things in a language which living men of to-day can comprehend, must keep up with the researches and discoveries of men who study nature, and put her words into the speech of the present.
John H. Vincent
#71. This is what language is:
a habitual grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this:
which hurts
just enough to be a scar
And heals just enough to be a nation.
Eavan Boland
#72. Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.
Mahatma Gandhi
#73. Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#74. The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.
Leonard Bloomfield
#75. [Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.
Seneca.
#76. I'm one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn't do Shakespeare ... The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.
Nicolas Cage
#77. Growing up in a family of actors, what's great about it is that they're very supportive and they understand what it's like to be an actor - the rejections, the highs and lows ... and having a common language with them is great because you have shorthand speech.
Chris Pine
#78. Utterances of cursed language defiles the hearts and souls of man and many.
T.F. Hodge
#79. Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.
Terry Pratchett
#80. The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.
Steven Pinker
#81. I am beginning to worry that my speech is becoming a rather incomprehensible mixture of a Victorian woman, an Australian Beach Bum and a Laddish city boy
C.S. Woolley
#82. Heart and Brain are the two lords of life. In the metaphors of ordinary speech and in the stricter language of science, we use these terms to indicate two central powers, from which all motives radiate, to which all influences converge.
George Henry Lewes
#83. Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.
David Brooks
#84. So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They that understand the meaning of language understand language and life better!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#85. Poetry is one of the destinies of speech ... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
Gaston Bachelard
#87. They spoke in semaphore, all punctuation unnecessary.
"You?"
"Great."
They'd trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.
Louise Penny
#88. So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.
Kathy Griffin
#89. What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot
#90. Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today's heritage and our new compositions to the future.
M. Fethullah Gulen
#91. I think it's important and I think it's true that our life experience is going to be about our attitude, our thoughts, our beliefs, our speech and our actions. We can transform our life experience simply by changing our language.
Jason Mraz
#92. The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.
Jonathan Swift
#93. Once he became president, George [H.] Bush revealed a vein of Styrofoam and no matter how deep he tried to go, he always ended up bobbing on the surface. His inaugural speech was like being present at the death of language ...
Kate Clinton
#94. Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.
John McGahern
#95. The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
Thomas Paine
#96. Body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words.
Deborah Bull
#97. Reality is beyond speech and thought. Only that which can be expressed in words is being said. But what cannot be put into language is indeed That which IS.
Anandamayi Ma
#98. His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
J.M. Coetzee
#99. Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, "inner speech," and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,
Oliver Sacks
#100. If we are not most careful with our thoughts and speech, the words we use will use us. Language has its own ethics, and one who communicates truth is like a bright light in the darkness.
Ted E. Brewerton
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