Language Quotes

He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat

~ Sara Sheridan

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

The Biblical language was so deeply embedded in the great man's mind that it became his normal way of speaking.

~ Elton Trueblood

...he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love.

~ The Alchemist

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

~ Louise Erdrich

Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.

~ David Mitchell

At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.

~ Octavio Paz

Clover['s] eyes are full of language.

~ Anne Sexton

Musicians do not have to be believed in. We do not have to be trusted. Our Music speaks for itself without the listener having to know anything about us. Music touches people's emotions in a way that nothing else can. When people find a musician they like, they are usually fans for Life. If they like the musician and his Music, they will open up their hearts to whatever that musician has to say. It matters not what country the musician or the fan comes from. Music is a language that all understand. It goes beyond and breaks down barriers. This makes the musician very powerful, and with power comes responsibility.

~ Victor L. Wooten

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

~ James Joyce

Communication is not so much about what you say, as what you don't say.

~ Jim George

Feelings or Emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are in your deepest place.

~ Judith Wright

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 Høeg

Finally he steeled himself to read the final rule again. He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie. It was an integral part of the learning of precise speech. Once, when he had been a Four, he had said, just prior to the midday meal at school, “I’m starving.” Immediately he had been taken aside for a brief private lesson in language precision. He was not starving, it was pointed out. He was hungry. No one in the community was starving, had ever been starving, would ever be starving. To say “starving” was to speak a lie. An unintentioned lie, of course. But the reason for precision of language was to ensure that unintentional lies were never uttered. Did he understand that? they asked him. And he had.

~ Lois Lowry

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status.

~ James W. Pennebaker

It was made clear to me that Music is related to everything, especially nature and language, but in order to speak it naturally, I had to first make myself a part of it.

~ Victor L. Wooten

Never invite someone who is speaking a foreign language in your presence to Go back to your country. The only time that phrase is every acceptable is if you are British and you are speaking to Madonna.

~ Celia Rivenbark

All language is an aspiration to music.

~ Steve Almond

ll our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters from other tongues and cultures.

~ Amos Oz

When two lovers discover a language of their own.

~ Saleem Sharma

Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise but, if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.

~ Terry Pratchett

This is the Southland burr, the only distinctive regional accent in the country. It's a soft appealing noise, deriving, I presume, from the Sottish settlers, but resembling no known Scottish accent. It's simply Kiwi English with added r's.

~ Joe Bennett

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.

~ Spencer Gordon

A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man

~ Frederick Douglass

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

~ Judith Butler

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.

~ G.h. Hardy

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

~ Joseph Brodsky

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

~ Roland Barthes

Hey dawg, wassup? he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment.

~ Craig Ferguson

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.

~ Julia Penelope

Learn to say “please” and “thank you” in multiple languages.

~ Steve Maraboli

To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.

~ Spyridon Marinatos

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates.

~ Melvin Schwartz

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.

~ James Joseph Sylvester

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

Body language has no translation.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

My people? Who are they?I went into the church where the congregationWorshiped my God. Were they my people?I felt no kinship to them as they knelt there.My people! Where are they?I went into the land where I was born,Where men spoke my language.I was a stranger there.“My people,” my soul cried. “Who are my people?”Last night in the rain I met an old manWho spoke a language I do not speak,Which marked him as one who does not know my God.With apologetic smile he offered meThe shelter of his patched umbrella.I met his eyes...And then I knew...

~ Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni

They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.

~ E.m. Forster