Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

If you'd combat bigotry, use honest language and call things out for what they really are.

If you load oppositional words with negative connotations, then critical thought is stifled. If you load supportive words with positive connotations, then people can’t avoid thinking in the prescribed way.

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

If you look at the historical record, you will find that language has always been in decline. Which means, really, and it never has.

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.

[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral.

If you use the term 'over-exaggerate,' you know the definition neither of 'exaggerate' nor of 'over.

If you've never studied German before or think you know nothing about it, you might be in for a little surprise. You already know many German words .And you have the advantage of being an English speaker,which means that your knowledge of that language will be a helpful tool for learning German efficiently and comfortably.

If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.

I grew up listening to languages my immigrant parents didn't want to teach me, so I get a regressive pleasure out of feeling my way through sounds to their possible meanings. Not "getting" a word, or a line, or a poem at first read was never an obstacle for me — in fact, it was a seduction.

I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow.

I had a dream about you last night... we tried to joke but neither could make any sense. We realized that puns are present in every language, though not shared by any of them.

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language... I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle…. Writing in my mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again…. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

I had rather my son should learn in a tan-house to speak, than in the schools to prate.

I have a disease; I see language.

I have had the pain of fragmentation deeply impressed upon my consciousness. The alienation felt by many people who are concerned about domination – the struggle we have even to make of our words a language that can be shared, understood.

I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.

I have often heard people who might sit with him on the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing immediately.

I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.

I have read in some of the old histories that in early times the Greeks did not know how to write until two men, one of whom was called Cadmus (Qatmus) and the other Aghanūn, came from Egypt bringing sixteen letters with which the Greeks wrote. Then one of these two men derived four other letters, also used for writing. Later, another man named Simonides (Simūnidus) derived four additional ones, making twenty-four. It was in those days that Socrates (Suqrātīs) appeared

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree: Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.

I have the strange feeling that man created language but now it creates us.

I needed words, lots of words to think about while I was going about the rest of the day. And I didn't want anything affected. I wanted nothing to do with those Romance languages. I wanted clipped words, full of common sense. Thoughts to wear beneath my thoughts. Allow, express, oath, vow, dismay, matter, splash, mollify. I liked those words. I liked saying them. I still do.

Je suis désolé,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.

I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedle-dum, “But it ain’t so, nohow.” “Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.

I know who you are though in a moment I will not. It is getting. I do not remember the word. Soon it will be. How easily they go again. There is no loyalty in language. There is no.

I know you do not understand what I am trying to tell you; I know you do not understand, because it is the thing that goes deepest into my heart, and there are no words as deep down as that. How can I make you know the reality of it? The world has spattered us all over with words, with cant phrases, with sarcasm, and with fulsome flattery. The world has been so officiously eager to explain for us the thing we mean and the worth of the thing that now, when we try to speak, our meaning is veiled, concealed, smothered, by the hideous volubility of facile expression. How can it have any reality for you when you hear only words about it?

I laughed to myself although there was no one there to see me. I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator. I liked to think of him waking up at night and thinking of me.

I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship.

I like to quote Shakespeare. But in this case, the rapper Eminem said it best: Words are a motherfucker.

I like to see an angry Englishman," said Poirot. "They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.

Il linguaggio umano è, in fondo, il grande scandalo della natura: il linguaggio umano costringe a riconoscere una discontinuità immotivata e improvvisa tra gli esseri viventi.

I know that language will be a crucial instrument, that I can overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouth.

Ileż zdań można utworzyć z dwudziestu czterech liter alfabetu? Ileż znaczeń można wyprowadzić z setek chwastów, grudek i innych drobiazgów?

I like the sounds of words. Words are very enjoyable. I like words because they are... seductive. And I like words because they can contain... fantasies.

I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the other hand, is just a command to ‘go do’.

Illiteracy also means not being able to read or write the words of a language you neither speak nor understand. ~ Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.

Making It in Hollywood is the most disgusting phrase in the English language. It’s more disturbing than prolific serial killer and rare terminal illness.

Imagination is thinking beyond language.

I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.

Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.

Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge—she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever.

{Miller, who was president of American Federation of Musicians, had this to say about Robert Ingersoll at his funeral} On behalf of 15,000 professional musicians, comprising the American Federation of Musicians, permit me to extend to you our heart-felt and most sincere sympathy in the irreparable loss of the model husband, father, and friend. In him the musicians of not only this country, but of all countries, have lost one whose noble nature grasped the true beauties of our sublime art, and whose intelligence gave those impressions expression in words of glowing eloquence that will live as long as language exists.

I'm made mute by the virtue of decision And I choose most of your life goes on without me Oh the fear I've known That I might reap the praise of strangers and end up on my own All I've sown was a song But maybe I was wrong

I'm online, therefore I am.

I'm often asked by my colleagues, of certain funny or strange words, "Is this a real word?" Of course it is - you just used it. It was crafted using characters that create a sound we both recognize and a meaning we both understand. It is not a hologram; we can write it on a piece of paper and hold it close to us for as long as we'd like. It will not dissolve into thin air. We are simply never going to live in a world in which new words aren't regularly emerging and shifting in use.