Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way, become present to us in sensuous form. The knowledge and use of this magic goes back very far: the rune; the chant; the incantation; the spell; the kenning; sacred words; forbidden words; the naming of the child, the plant, the insect, the ocean, the configuration of stars, the snow, the sensation in the body. The ritual telling of the dream. The physical reality of the human voice; of words gouged or incised in stone or wood, woven in silk or wool, painted on vellum, or traced in sand.

Poetry is speech, cast in written language, that demands a response; it’s part of a conversation.

Poetry is a language that can be read by all, but very few understand it.

Poems are the music of our childhoods

Poetry helps heal wounds. Makes them tangible. At the poetry reading I read a poem. A prophecy I wrote down. Almost couldn't go through with it. But it came out hurried and hot and by the end my tongue was on fire.

Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience. It is not necessarily comfortable. It is not necessarily safe.

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.

Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

Ponovo, posle mnogo godina, rečenica, i to ista, kao da se nikada ranije nije pojavila, kao da prvi put stiže sa velike udaljenosti i pokušava da kaže nešto u šta niko ionako ne veruje, a kako i da joj veruju kada između njenih odlazaka i povratka ne prođe dovoljno vremena ili, možda, naprotiv, kako neki kažu, prođe previše vremena, tako da se do kraja ne zna ko je u pravu, oni koji tvrde da tekst čita sebe ili oni koji misle da ga čita neko drugi, sve je moguće u toj rečenici, pa čak i da to ne bude ona ista rečenica, već neka koja je, ko zna kada, počela da igra ulogu prve rečenice, da se retvara da dolazi i odlazi kada to ona hoće, a sve sa jednim ciljem, koji zapravo nije još nijednom rekla, odnosno ponudila na čitanje, budući da rečenice, same za sebe, nikada ne govore, da uvek ćute, spremne da zavole nečije usne, uverene da su usne ono što njima, rečenicama, nedostaje, pa tako i ovoj rečenici, koja promiče neizgovorena i, po svemu sudeći, uopšte ne namerava da stane, već će nastaviti da se kreće, pravdajući se potragom za smislom, za jezikom, za usnama, gornjom i donjom, koje odavde liče na školjku, a odande, iz blizine, ne liče ni na šta, kao ni ova rečenica. (Rečenica)

Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a person's sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You don't need to describe high performers as biologically exceptional, because what they do is a product of practice. Anyone can become a foreign-language expert - even an adult. (...) The other view says: Something neurological is going on. We may not know exactly what the mechanisms are, but we can't explain exceptional outcomes fully through training or motivation.

Posted by admin A Quote of the Day---By Ehsan Sehgal---18-08-2018---3.30 PM, The Hague, Netherlands A sober, wise and visionary one never dress its vision with the filth, abusing and humiliating tongue of immoral language. Ehsan Sehgal

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of 'Mary Jane' for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember.

Prestare attenzione a ciò che con-viene al dire pensante non implica solo che noi ogni volta meditiamo su che cosa dire dell'essere e su come dirlo. Resta altrettanto essenziale riflettere se si possa dire ciò che è da pensare, fino a che punto lo si possa dire, in quale attimo della storia dell'essere, in quale dialogo con questa storia, e in base a quale pretesa. Le tre cose menzionate in una mia precedente lettera sono determinate, nella loro reciproca connessione, dalla legge della con-venienza del pensiero della storia dell'essere: il rigore della meditazione, la cura del dire, la parsimonia delle parole.

Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. Everyone equal. No one higher or lower than anyone else. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.

Profanity in language is like salt in food. Too much will give you high blood pressure. Too little and it gets really f'ing bland.

Profanity is to language like salt is to food. Too much will give you high blood pressure. Too little and it gets really f'ing bland.

Profanity is to language as salt is to food. Too much will give you high blood pressure. Too little and it gets really f'ing bland."

Progressives' don’t just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.

Puisque la maîtresse me "reprenait", plus tard j'ai voulu reprendre mon père, lui annoncer que "se parterrer" ou "quart moins d'onze heures" n'existaient pas. Il est entré dans une violente colère. Une autre fois : "Comment voulez-vous que je ne me fasse pas reprendre, si vous parlez mal tout le temps!" Je pleurais. Il était malheureux. Tout ce qui touche au langage est dans mon souvenir motif de rancœur et de chicanes douloureuses, bien plus que l'argent.

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable "Chilean sea bass.

Puns are at their core defined by multiplicity of meaning, not necessarily humor. The common expectation that puns should always be funny, or die in the attempt, is a relatively modern development.

Puns often seem to propagate in direct proportion to efforts aimed at suppressing them. Tell someone they can't say something, and they'll find another way, much as a river will eventually find a way round any mountain on its journey to the sea.

Quien calla una palabra es su dueño; quien la pronuncia es su esclavo.

Quran, Bible and Bhagavad Gita were told by God and written by you, may be you had misinterpreted according to your language, faith and culture

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

Raphael looked like he might have laughed if he'd been younger and more cheerful. 'Why are you using the Jesuit dictionary?' 'How do you know what I'm using? A d it's the only Quechua dictionary.' 'It's probably shrine,'I said, and then when Clem frowned, not understanding, 'not idol.' Raphael nodded to me and I smiled, because he was taking it so gently. I would have burst out laughing if someone had translated Christchurch as Heathen God Temple in front of me.

Raymond collected expressions. He repeated them in experimental accents, as if learning a tune. He sounded like an Eighteenth Street Mexican when he said cuate, like a Logan Square cubano when he said comemierda.

Rather than living only in the present, the use of verbal symbols allowed the Homo sapiens to mysteriously transcend the immediate experience given by the physical senses and to live in an abstract, extra-sensory, and hypothetical world.

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

Reading, seeing, and hearing happen way more often than understanding.

Religion is a language, if you can speak it, it's a bridge, if not, then it's a barrier.

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.

Regardless of what language it is said in, "I love you" stays beautiful, and two hearts beating together make the same sound. It is the language of Love.

Regret is one the scariest words in any language and success is one of the most beautiful ones. What are you waiting for?

Remember that lettuce doesn’t grow on a spruce; and it also doesn’t rhyme with it.

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book: When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language. And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books. So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.

Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others: Giving orders, and obeying them— Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements— Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)— Reporting an event— Speculating about an event— Forming or teasing a hypothesis— Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams— Making up a story; and reading it— Singing catches— Guessing riddles— Making riddles— Making a joke; telling it— Solving a problem in practical arithmetic— Translating from one language into another— Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. —It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)

(Rigg) had often complained that all these languages were useless, and Father had only said, "A man who speaks but one language understands none.

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

Rigorously comb through the pages of your life until you can even speak its broken dialects fluently.

Ritual Version —for Kate Middleton humself, shamself, hymnself, shameself—. lameself, lambself, numbself, unself—. sing anger, goddess, of—. many devices—. sing anger godless—. tell me who—. sacred in the sea suffered so many woes—. bookshelf, doubtshelf, debtshelf, riftshelf—. driftshelf, truthshelf, foolshelf, rueshelf—. sing less the many souls sent—. they perished—. sing spoils for the dogs—. who swallowed down the foolish song—. the soul and its companions—. nounself, nonceself, nonself, lashself—. ashself, lawself, thoughtself, aughtself—. tell me, muse, from any point—. and birds—. sing less the wrath of—. a man’s cleverness—. tell also us—. of recklessness—. of home—.

ROSEMARY Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary— Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly— born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company, braids a garland of festivity. Not always rosemary— since the flight to Egypt, blooming differently. With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath, its flowers—white originally— turned blue. The herb of memory, imitating the blue robe of Mary, is not too legendary to flower both as symbol and as pungency. Springing from stones beside the sea, the height of Christ when thirty-three— it feeds on dew and to the bee “hath a dumb language”; is in reality a kind of Christmas-tree.

She'd always been comforted by how many words there were in the English language -- more than a million. With so many words surely anything could be said, everything could be understood. But what did the volume of words matter in any language when she couldn't even manage to ask the simplest questions? Will you tell me your story? Will you let me in to my own family? Isn't it my story, too?