Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

Souls speak with each other through poetry!

Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.

Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.

Speak the words that will free you. Express yourself.

Speak English!" said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!" And the Eaglet bend down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.

Speak dumb person, please.

Språket var den enda magin mot döden.

...spoken confession releases us into forgiveness. Speaking enacts the attitude of repentance that is the precondition of healing and restoration. Like the naming of God's attributes and promises in praise, the particularity and specificity of what is named accounts for much of the psychological efficacy of confession.

Sprache ist eine Waffe. Haltet sie scharf.

Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels, and the like. They signal education and learning, but they are not the same thing as education and learning.

, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round." "The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly. "Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.

Statt der typischen Kehllaute hatte Sofi Knacklaute gehört. War das Berberisch? Sie hoffte auf Äthiopisch.

Stories themselves have spirit and being, and they have a way of communicating on different levels. The story itself communicates with us regardless of what language it is told in. Of course stories are always funnier and more vivid when they are told in their original language by a good storyteller. But what I love about stories is they can survive and continue in some form or other resembling themselves regardless of how good or how bad the storyteller is, no matter what language they are told or written in. This is because the human brain favors stories or the narrative form as a primary means of organizing and relating human experience. Stories contain large amounts of valuable information even when they storyteller forgets or invents details.

Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they're made of life.

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

Striving to convey to this beloved audience of one what was going on around me during those five years, I learned the power of language to map a life, to overcome a distance, to focus attention on what matters most.

Strong communicators increase their influence because they are intentional and focused with their language.

Student-people are different from other people. They spend their entire life asking questions, and as soon as they have found out the answers, they start all over again with new, harder questions... when a student-person finds a good answer to a hard question, the other student-people will gasp, hug each other, and then throw a party. Those parties never last long, for student-people are in a hurry to go back to work and find new answers.

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it. Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording. The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life.

Such avian silence is punctuated only by the occasional plunk of a trout sinking an ovipositioning daddy longlegs, and the hysterical cackle of a Mallard that finally gets last night’s joke.

Suddenly everyone in the room was laughing. With her own bright laughter, Salimah felt a great gust of air that had long been caught in her throat come bursting forth, and was aware of something new approaching within her as she drew fresh breath.

Super 8 film is the language of silence.

Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.

Take language, one of the few distinctive human capacities about which much is known. We have very strong reasons to believe that all possible human languages are very similar; a Martian scientist observing humans might conclude that there is just a single language, with minor variants. The reason is that the particular aspect of human nature that underlies the growth of language allows very restricted options. Is this limiting? Of course. Is it liberating? Also of course. It is these very restrictions that make it possible for a rich and intricate system of expression of thought to develop in similar ways on the basis of very rudimentary, scattered, and varied experience.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant...' is Emily Dickinson's advice.... I've been struck by how often slant is confused with bias - as though having a point of view, a set of assumptions, or a firmly held opinion is in itself unscrupulous or unfair. And as though neutrality is the mark of fairness or truth.

Tell me a story, a story that will be my story as well as the story of everyone and everything about me, the story that brings us together in a valley community, a story that brings together the human community with every living being in the valley, a story that brings us together under the arc of the great blue sky in the day and the starry heavens at night, a story that will drench us with rain and dry us in the wind, a story told by humans to one another that will also be the story that the wood thrush sings in the thicket, the story that the river recites in its downward journey, the story that Storm King Mountain images forth in the fullness of its grandeur.

Tears were a kind of language and I felt all language was far away from me. I was beneath tears. Tears were what you shed in purgatory. By the time you were in hell it was too late.

Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.

...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

[T]hat all seekers of knowledge should use the identical language to think and to read and write is not a development to which humanity can remain indifferent. Reality is constructed by languages, and the existence of a variety of languages means the existence of a variety of realities, a variety of truths. Understanding the multifaceted nature of truth does not necessarily make people happy, but it makes them humble, and mature, and wise. It makes them worthy of the name Homo sapiens.

That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

Thank you,’ I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.” (169).

That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing," Frances informs her niece. "That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

That one of history’s greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.

That’s hard to say, but there is no denying, for Icelanders at least, language is an immense source of joy. Everything wise and wonderful about this quirky little nation flows from its language. The formal Icelandic reading is ‘komdu saell,’ which translates literally as ‘come happy’. When Icelanders part, they say ‘vertu saell,’ ‘go happy’. I like that one a lot. It’s much better than ‘take care’ or ‘catch you later’.

That's just like the manual says," said Witherwax. "If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time." "You mean with no homonyms?" said Doc Brenner. Mr. Gross belched again, and held up two fingers to indicate another Boilermaker. "Are you saying that the language a fella speaks can make a fairy of him?" ("Gin Comes In Bottles")

That’s when I have to ask him. “Can you really talk like that? Being holy and all?” “What? Because I’m a priest?” He finishes the dregs of his coffee. “Sure. God knows what’s important.

...that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.

That which is now called learning, was not learning originally. Learning does not consist, as the schools now make it consist, in the knowledge of languages, but in the knowledge of things to which language gives names.

The Actor, noticing a closed bookshop, dismounted from the horse which he tied to a street lamp. He woke up the bookseller and bought a Spanish grammar and dictionary. He set out again across town marveling at the way that the words of the foreign language were freshly gathered fruits and not old and dry. They touched the senses marvelously, new like young beggars who accost you, not yet words but the every things they designate, happily running naked before being clothed again in abstraction.

That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.

That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.

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

The alternative is to locate large deposits of specifically what we need, and extract it in bulk from the earth.” “That’s mining,” said the Drip. “There is a twenty-third century legend that youth was conscripted to work in mines. Anyhow, all young people were known as miners at one period.

The aim of interpretation is not agreement but understanding

The Almost Forgotten Human Language is ‘Feeling.

The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.