Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

In English we blame others for not understanding us when really it's our fault for not saying what we wanted to say.

I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked - Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).

In France the most often used word is “connerie,” which means “bullshit,” and in America it’s hands-down “awesome,” which has replaced “incredible,” “good,” and even “just OK.” Pretty much everything that isn’t terrible is awesome in America now.

In Farsi we ask: Haal-e shomaa chetoreh? It is the same: how are you? But when I answer, when I am little, my father never let me say good or okay. Because he says he is asking about the feeling, you know... like, how is your heart?" "My heart is happy," I say, "Happy you called.

In future, brainwave is a media of universal language.

In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.

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.

In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation.

In my opinion, at the present time there can not be a native language in the strict sense of the word. In my vision, the native language is a language in which you can enjoy the power of deeper thinking, it is more natural to express your inner thoughts, to improve yourself. This can not be mandatory, no external condition can automatically determine which one should be your native language. It should be the object of free choice, and only you can choose it, simply because the language is an internal phenomenon, but not external. Only your brain can determine which language is best for expressing your thoughts. Be yourself, ignore all external factors, get freedom to choose your native language, which suits you best.

In other words, all the highest aims of language are decisively the work of God. They are decisively supernatural. And no amount of poetic effort or expertise in the use of words can bring about the great aims of life if God withholds his saving power.

I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.

...in providing refuge and in challenging us - [stories] are instruments of healing. For all these reasons, the power of story is one we must not abdicate. The church needs to be a place where stories are told, where we are invited back into the stories we live by, and where we come to find ourselves at home again in a dwelling made of words that is reconstructed in every telling. We need good storytellers to keep us alive and imagining. The exercise of the imagination is the training ground of compassion. Stories educate the heart. Stories, like poetry, are related to prayer. They have an incantatory, invocational function. They call forth and focus our dread and desire. They are vehicles of confession, thanksgiving, petition.

In reading a recent novel, I myself was convicted by a comment the mother makes to her adult daughter: ‘My dear, you’ve missed so many opportunities to say nothing.’ We do miss these opportunities, as well as opportunities to say less and say it more judiciously. And so we miss particular delights of finding words and speaking them into silences big enough to allow them to be heard.

In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in themselves, but only insofar as they constitute evidence that permits one to determine fundamental features of the real world, within a course of inquiry that is invariably undertaken under sharp idealizations, often implicit and simply common understanding, but always present.

In reality, love is fluid; it’s a verb, not a noun.

In science fiction, telepaths often communicate across language barriers, since thoughts are considered to be universal. However, this might not be true. Emotions and feelings may well be nonverbal and universal, so that one could telepathically send them to anyone, but rational thinking is so closely tied to language that it is very unlikely that complex thoughts could be sent across language barriers. Words will still be sent telepathically in their original language.

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have—the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction need to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

In the days of Prismatic Color not in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the refinement of early civilization art, but because of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band of incandescence that was color keep its stripe

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.

In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you're in trouble and maybe that there's a cover-up.

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

In Uganda, I wrote a questionaire that I had my research assistants give; on it, I asked about the embalasassa, a speckled lizard said to be poisonous and to have been sent by Prime minsister Milton Obote to kill Baganda in the late 1960s. It is not poisonous and was no more common in the 1960s than it had been in previous decades, as Makerere University science professors announced on the radio and stated in print… I wrote the question, What is the difference between basimamoto and embalasassa? Anyone who knows anything about the Bantu language—myself included—would know the answer was contained in the question: humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes… A few of my informants corrected my ignorance… but many, many more ignored the translation in my question and moved beyond it to address the history of the constructs of firemen and poisonous lizards without the slightest hesitation. They disregarded language to engage in a discussion of events… My point is not about the truth of the embalasassa story… but rather that the labeling of one thing as ‘true’ and the other as ‘fictive’ or ‘metaphorical’—all the usual polite academic terms for false—may eclipse all the intricate ways in which people use social truths to talk about the past. Moreover, chronological contradictions may foreground the fuzziness of certain ideas and policies, and that fuzziness may be more accurate than any exact historical reconstruction… Whether the story of the poisionous embalasassa was real was hardly the issue; there was a real, harmless lizard and there was a real time when people in and around Kampala feared the embalasassa. They feared it in part because of beliefs about lizards, but mainly what frightened people was their fear of their government and the lengths to which it would go to harm them. The confusions and the misunderstandings show what is important; knowledge about the actual lizard would not.

Io incomincio a capirlo, la patria non è solo una terra, un paesaggio, una famiglia, la patria è soprattutto una lingua.

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.

Invisible prose only!" rules out the sparkling style of [writers]. . . For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique caliber of truth. Is there any other art form one would praise by saying it's "invisible"? By definition, art transcends the ordinary, calls attention to itself, and offers virtuosity as its calling card. One that makes it possible to do what metaphor does so well: illuminate what can't be wholly understood.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

I phoned the Admiral back. 'It's no use, Admiral, the French speak nothing but French.' There was a short pause on the end of the line then his voice rattled into life like a sabre. 'They're lying, Tim!' 'What?' 'The French Navy must by law speak English, as English is the international maritime language of the sea.' 'Has anyone told the French that?' The line went dead for a moment before he thundered, 'Yes Nelson. At the battle of Trafalgar.' I tried to stifle an irresistibly British giggle not knowing if the Admiral was making a joke or not. I got it right. He was serious.

I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their long-houses, or how to make a solar toilet, or how to dry bear meat in the sun. I could tell you all of this if I could talk, but instead the words stayed inside of me and marveled. This I could accept, or so I told myself for a long time. Because the words were there, and they carried me to another place.

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.

I realize many wonderful things about language - "realize" in the sense of feeling or understanding intuitively: I realize such things most often when I am greatly concerned with another person's feelings. I think such realization is one gift which human beings may give each other. I'm not much good at analysis or scholarly efforts with language, probably because I don't value them as much as I value understanding, which is informed by that which is deeply felt before it is examined.

I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said “you can feel the food.” That was how Owen would end up with students who said “savor,” while I would end up with students who said “papel iss blonk.

I refuse to be linguistically constrained by dictionary writers.

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and events in great part shaped by the very language in which we describe them? When we try to describe one person to another or to a group, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job -- no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being.

Irony is a linguistic trust fall.

I should think a dead language would be rather boring, socially speaking.

Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.

..i spill into the kind of silence only Khalil Gibran would understand.

Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can describe in any page-filling paragraph that can't be captured better in just a sentence or two? Perhaps even nothing in any sentence which cannot better be refined in a single, spot-on word? Does it not follow, then, that there's likely nothing one can say in any word - in saying anything at all - that, ultimately, isn't better left unsaid? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

Isn't language amazing? I can't get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and its like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don't know if its disgusting or beautiful.

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.

I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. "Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it.

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.

I suggested, further, that the following might be sculpted: a large box filled with sixty moonshine jugs--piled high, toppling over, corks popping, liquor flowing. Disorder to match the clutter and chaos of our marvelous language. Words upon words, piled high, toppling over, thoughts popping, correspondence and conversation overflowing.

...it always felt good to have that moment of resolve, like saying, "I'm gonna learn French!" It doesn't matter if you do it or not, deciding is the high, right?