Language Quotes

Language is a more recent technology. Your body language, your eyes, your energy will come through to your audience before you even start speaking.

~ Peter Guber

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

~ David Crystal

The 'silk' in silkpunk refers not to a source of power, but to an entirely different, expressive technology language.

~ Ken Liu

The pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies our stereotypes of age, education, language and income.

~ Narendra Modi

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

~ Larry Wall

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

~ Alan Kay

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

~ Ronald Reagan

A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.

~ William Arthur Ward

I come from a place where everything about me, even my body language, is saying: I mean you no harm. I smile, I laugh. Basic stuff for most people.

~ Oscar Isaac

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

~ Stephen King

When the heart speaks, its language is the same under all latitudes.

~ Ella Maillart

The huge difference in my lifetime is that you can just go up to somebody and make a pass. You couldn't do that in the 1950s if you were gay. There were secret handshakes, a secret language. There was nowhere you could go to be romantic outside of people's houses.

~ Ian Mckellen

We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.

~ Edward T. Hall

Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level.

~ David Mitchell

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

~ Greg Boyle

Instead of this confusion, we need the unifying force of an official language, English, which is the language of success in America.

~ Ernest Istook

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

~ Niels Bohr

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

~ Umberto Eco

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

~ Rita Dove

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

~ Eavan Boland

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

~ T. S. Eliot

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

~ Eileen Myles

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

~ Victor Hugo

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

~ Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

~ Erica Jong

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

~ Edward Hirsch

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.

~ Edward Hirsch

'Milk and Honey' was written with me being honest to myself, kind of pulling at the things that I hear the most and saying that out loud, and you know, that thing that we hear the most is most universal, and so that rings true with all folks. The language used in the poetry is extremely, extremely accessible.

~ Rupi Kaur

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.

~ Alice Mcdermott

I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

~ Janet Fitch

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

~ Rita Dove

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

~ Robert Morgan

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

~ Robert Morgan

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

~ Robert Morgan

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

~ James Fenton

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

~ James Fenton

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

~ Tamsin Greig

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.

~ Cynthia Ozick