What Is Language Quotes

#1. It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?

Hanif Kureishi

#2. My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.

David Bohm

#3. Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.

Edward R. Murrow

#4. 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

#5. "What is the most beautiful word in the language?" The elderly lawyer quickly replied: "Home."

Chauncey Depew

#6. I know what the structure of the language is.

Kurt Loder

#7. What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

Terence McKenna

#8. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.

Bruno Dumont

#9. being articulate is not a facility of language but a fidelity to vision. And so we are all articulate when finding the courage to say what we see.

Mark Nepo

#10. I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.

Tess Gerritsen

#11. I'm a big believer in rehearsal and a big believer in the actors being able to find the material themselves and identify with the beats themselves without us having to stick to the actual language of the script, just for them to understand what each scene is about.

Dean Israelite

#12. English is only a weak second language, so that the third language
which at the moment is getting the most play, since French is what I speak, read, and hear almost 24/7
is trying to take over the no. 2 spot.

Apol Lejano-Massebieau

#13. To see beauty is to learn the private language of meaning which is another's life - to recognize and relish what is. beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?

CrimethInc.

#14. Poetry has its own unique language which every mind translates differently according to their own personal view.

Debasish Mridha

#15. What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.

Branford Marsalis

#16. It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

Noam Chomsky

#17. Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.

Anne Carson

#18. It is striking how our language reveals the visual nature of our thoughts about the future state of affairs. When we invent the future, we try to get a mental picture of what things will be like long before we have begun the journey. Visions are our windows on the world of tomorrow.

James M. Kouzes

#19. People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#20. The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing.

John N. Gray

#21. The world is not the most pleasant place. Eventually your parents leave you and nobody is going to go out of their way to protect you unconditionally. You need to learn to stand up for yourself and what you believe and sometimes, pardon my language, kick some ass.

Queen Elizabeth II

#22. Music is so hard to talk about in many ways, It communicates beyond what our language can put across, and having to sit there and analyze it and talk about it is a struggle for me.

Jeff Martin

#23. A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows.

John Hall Wheelock

#24. They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!

Harry Hopkins

#25. 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

#26. She walks to a table
She walk to table
She is walking to a table
She walk to table now
What difference does it make
What difference it make
In Nature, no completeness
No sentence really complete thought
Language, like woman,
Look best when free, undressed.

Wang Ping

#27. I don't know what is stronger or what is weaker.The whole language of strength and weaknesses is irrelevant,because when you use arms you do not use ballots, and public opinion is unimportant, and they shoot at their opponents.

Shimon Peres

#28. This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with'disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.

Amy Reed

#29. I try for a poetic language that says, This is who we are, where we have been, where we are. This is where we must go. And this is what we must do.

Mari Evans

#30. Language is too complex for a computer to understand. It's not going to be able to make sense of what people are saying en masse. We need a new type of discipline that puts together computer scientists and social scientists, who can add context to the situation.

Noreena Hertz

#31. Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

Yusef Komunyakaa

#32. At times it does not really matter what language you are speaking, especially when you are emotional and try to reach other hearts. To transcend emotion, silence is the best language.

Abu Sufyan Ibn Harb

#33. What distinguishes man from his innocent brothers, the animals, ... is not language, nor reason, nor even civilization ... it is man's enormous appetite for suffering.

Georges Duhamel

#34. Here's the test - if you can't take your church culture and language and drop it in the middle of a bar or a bus, and have it make winsome sense to the people there, then it's not from Jesus. Because that is exactly what he could do. That's what made him the real deal.

John Eldredge

#35. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.

Zhuangzi

#36. 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

#37. Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

Jay Griffiths

#38. The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

Joe Armstrong

#39. For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or-to put the thing less cynically-we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice.

E. M. Forster

#40. Our English language really says if you're not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism.

John Shelby Spong

#41. What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

John Burnside

#42. This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.

Terence McKenna

#43. And language, ( ... ) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what seperates the human from the non human.

Oliver Sacks

#44. There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.

Edna Ferber

#45. Uh, she said maybe your eyes matched the Fog like a synchronous magnetic field?"
"I don't even know what language that is.

Joel N. Ross

#46. Language is what books do very well and movement is what movies does very well.

Chuck Palahniuk

#47. The market is like a language, and you have to be able to understand what they're saying.

Jil Sander

#48. Typography is what communication looks like.
There is beauty in the language and beauty in the way it is presented.

James Felici

#49. To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing
what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

Gerhard Richter

#50. What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilization.

Mark Pesce

#51. What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.

David Sedaris

#52. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too - whenever I've lost my way, it's brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I'm here.

Slash, Anthony Bozza

#53. What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

Jonathan Lethem

#54. What I do is write books for an audience that thinks in a movie language. That's the way I think, and I also believe that not enough authors keep up with the audience.

Matthew Reilly

#55. When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

James A. Baldwin

#56. I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

Jane Hirshfield

#57. What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today when human contacts go so fast. Fashion is instant language.

Miuccia Prada

#58. 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

#59. Typography is what language looks like.

Ellen Lupton

#60. Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

Rene Daumal

#61. We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.

Joseph Roux

#62. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Jeanette Winterson

#63. Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A

Kim Stanley Robinson

#64. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.

Richard Leakey

#65. Actions do not betray, but language is filled with the danger of betrayal at any instant. This quality is what makes language both infinitely beautiful and infinitely frightening.

Enchi Fumiko

#66. If I talk about her like she's a being
It's because talking about her I need to use the language of men
Which gives personality to things,
And imposes a name on things.

Alberto Caeiro

#67. The presentation of hard core pornography, brutality and shocking language, from what I hear, is leaving the public jaded and tired of this kind of film.

Pola Negri

#68. My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.

John Updike

#69. I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

Barbara Kingsolver

#70. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

Haruki Murakami

#71. We sit for a few more moments, although there's really nothing left to say. This is new to me, too, an entire conversation that takes place in silence, because the heart has its own language. I will remember what Eric says even though he doesn't say a word. I will tell it to her.

Jodi Picoult

#72. what people say is important, as well as how they say it, but even more important than that is the body language of the person.

Scott Smith

#73. Meditation is the language of God. If we want to know what God's Will is in our life, if we want God to guide us, mould us and fulfil Himself in and through us, then meditation is the language that we must use.

Sri Chinmoy

#74. Basketball doesn't care what color your skin is. It doesn't care what language you speak or what religion you practice. It doesn't care if you're big or small, fast or slow. It just asks you to play, to complete, to lose with dignity, to win humility.

Jim Calhoun

#75. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#76. What I really like doing is storytelling, finding the body language that is necessary for the story. And when I'm doing it and it's working, I'm thrilled.

Patricia Birch

#77. How emigration is actually lived - well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.

Daniel Alarcon

#78. Wise is the man who learns the nonverbal language of his wife, who notes the nod and discerns the gestures. It's not just what is said, but how. It's not just how, but when. It's not just when, but where. Good husbanding is good decoding. You've got to read the signs.

Max Lucado

#79. We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.

Terence McKenna

#80. When babies listen, what they're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear.

Patricia K. Kuhl

#81. Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?

J.M. Coetzee

#82. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

George Orwell

#83. We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both "what" we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.

Judith Butler

#84. What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about.

Jeanette Winterson

#85. When a Japanese manufacturer was asked by his North American counterpart, What is the best language in which to do business?" the man responded: "My customer's language

Leonard Sweet

#86. The wonderful thing is, imagination is universal all over the world, no matter what the language is.

Roy Horn

#87. If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.

Lorrie Moore

#88. 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

#89. There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.

Samuel Beckett

#90. If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.

Terence McKenna

#91. The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

Yann Martel

#92. I tend more towards what some people call literary science fiction, but what I mean by that is that it is full of interesting language, experimentation, and ideas.

Edward Einhorn

#93. I put on the page a third look at what I've seen in life - the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.

Dorothy Allison

#94. Contrary to what phenomenology - which is always phenomenology of perception - has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.

Jacques Derrida

#95. This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

Stanley Fish

#96. If Language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant. If what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done, remains undone.

Confucius

#97. I don't know what it is about the french language, it seems to be scared of coming out of the mouth so it comes out the nose instead.

P.D.Q. Bach

#98. Disease [is] as one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.

Susanna Kaysen

#99. George P. A. Healy; I knew no one in France, I was utterly ignorant of the language, I did not know what I should do when once there; but I was not yet one-and-twenty, and I had a great stock of courage, of inexperience - which is sometimes a great help - and a strong desire to be my very best.

David McCullough

#100. The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are.

Stephen J. Rivele