Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

When something happens to you that is beyond words, life is happening to you. When the Ultimate is happening to you, you are beyond words.

When the heart is down and the soul is heavy, the eyes can only speak the language of tears

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive.

When the meaning is unclear there is no meaning.

When two lovers discover a language of their own.

When we converse, we act together toward a common end, and we act upon one another. Indeed, conversation is a form of activism - a political enterprise in the largest and oldest sense - a way of building sustaining community.

When we examine common words, we find that, broadly speaking, proper names stand for particulars, while other substantives, adjectives, prepositions, and verbs stand for universals. Pronouns stand for particulars, but are ambiguous: it is only by the context or the circumstances that we know the pronoun's meaning. Every sentence must contain at least one universal.

When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.

When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?

When you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe.

When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.

When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.

When you understand the language of the faith of another person, you can connect with him not only intellectually but also emotionally. A common faith builds relationships and binds people.

Where personal experience is concerned, we all speak a different language.

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.

Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, "discourse communities" are often gated,so it's the good writer's job to offer readers a set of keys.

Who cares what colour your hair or what shape your shape is? Who cares what religion your religion or what language your language is? What is the colour of your heart? That is all that matters!

While English is an international language, the Art language is the universal one.

Who could trust language?

Who hasn't been told "love you?" I don't put much stock in such words because it's the "I" that gives "love you" its true essence and intimate meaning, so unless someone can bring themselves to say "I love you," don't subtract from the significance by saying something less.

Who am I, in French? I really don't know -- a bit of everything, perhaps.

Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?

Why are we running after beautiful texts, perfect language, fancy vocabulary! Forget the Grammar, forget those perfect writers. Remember writers write from their heart, so just pen down your thoughts and throw away external fancies.

Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

Why are there more male hyperpolyglots? One answer is that speaking a lot of languages is a geek macho thing (...) It seemed that a woman is less likely to say she "speaks" or "knows" a language if she studied it at some point in the past, while a man, wanting to display his giant repertoire, would include it.

Why must we be so restricted by language, these ruined tongues! These twenty-six letters- how can that explain this agony? How could we ever endeavor to prove what we are here for- through such combinations? Death is just a word someone invented for what happens at the end of a person’s life. It’s only a word: if there was no word for it we wouldn’t be so worried!

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?

Why is English so widespread today, and not Danish?

Why is it that languages always change? It's easy enough to see why we need to have common agreements on grammar and vocabulary in order to be able to talk to one other. But if that's all that we need language for, one would think that, once a given set of speakers found a grammar and vocabulary that suited their purposes, they'd simply stick with it, perhaps changing the vocabulary around if there was some new thing to talk about--a new trend or invention, an imported vegetable--but otherwise, leaving well enough alone. In fact, this never happens. We don't know of a single recorded example of a language that, over the course of, say, a century, did not change both in sound and structure. This is true even of the languages of the most "traditional" societies; it happens even where elaborate institutional structures have been created--like grammar schools, or the Académie Française--to ensure that it does not. No doubt some of this is the result of sheer rebelliousness (young people trying to set themselves off from elders, for example) but it's hard to escape the conclusion that ultimately, what we are really confronting here is the play principle in its purest form. Human beings, whether they speak Arapesh, Hopi, or Norwegian, just find it boring to say things the same way all the time. They're always going to play around at least a little. And this playing around will always have cumulative effects. (p. 200)

Why no s for two deer, but an s for two monkeys? Brother Quang says no one knows. So much for rules! Whoever invented English should be bitten by a snake.

Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?" - "When Our Lips Speak Together

WONDERLAND It is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonder That sets them on their initial quest for truth. The more doors you open, the smaller you become. The more places you see and the more people you meet, The greater your curiosity grows. The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander. The more you wander, the greater the wonder. The more you quench your thirst for wonder, The more you drink from the cup of life. The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become. The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel. And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding. And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences. And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective, And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance. Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel. And the smaller you feel, the greater you become. The more you see, the more you love -- The more you love, the less walls you see. The more doors you are willing to open, The less close-minded you will be. The more open-minded you are, The more open your heart. And the more open your heart, The more you will be able to Send and receive -- Truth and TRUE Unconditional LOVE.

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.

Words are such fun!

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.

Words can be medicines; they can also be poisons. Words can heal; they can also kill... It all depends on how, when and where they are use and against whom! Let us not abuse our words. It's a misuse of the tongue!

Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.

Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in "foreign commerce" on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves - this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes ("News From The World")

Words are power. The more words you know and can recognize, use, define, understand, the more power you will have as a human being... The more language you know, the more likely it is that no one can get over on you." selection from book: Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is crucial to every scientific advance, to our intellectual curiosity, to our originality as human individuals, because it is crucial to our ability to communicate new ideas and discoveries.

Words in the head are sticky and social creatures – when you finally pull one out, you're liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their palling around with other words.

Words simply mean what people think they mean when they say them.

Words were stories in themselves.

Writers are writing in every corner of the globe. Writers are writing, moreover, in rich countries and poor countries alike.

Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the same time while remaining alive.