Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

Nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muse can be changed from its own to another language without destroying its sweetness

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

Numbers are really fascinating things, and they do play a big part in our lives. They are a language of their own.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that circulates informally.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion.

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.

Often when you get a really good script, and you receive the new pages, you see that the entire thing has been dumbed down. Films in the '30s and '40s, that were huge blockbusters, were very sophisticated in their language, and the ideas they brought. There were no questions about whether the audience would get it or not.

Of those who say nothing, few are silent.

Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.

Omens are the individual language in which God talks to you. My omens are not your omens.

Old Marley was dead as a doornail... The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.

Once i spoke the language of the flowers,Once i undrestand each word the caterpillar said,Once i smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings.

Once you embody the language, the character comes really naturally, especially when you put the costume on.

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

Once I started singing, I realized it was a language I'd forgotten I could speak.

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.

One of the most frustrating words in the human language, as far as I could tell, was love" - Bethany

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.

One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.

One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.

One of the benefits of being a mature well-educated woman is that you're not afraid of expletives. And you have no fear to put a fool in his place. That's the power of language and experience. You can learn a lot from Shakespeare.

One of the things that I think about is: How do you make moments that float, transparent? Moments that could just float away. How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning? Why not make a body accountable for its language?

... one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross over-simplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

One’s visual language is not something that manifests overnight. It develops organically over a life-time. The shifts can be so subtle as to be virtually imperceptible and, at times, will come to fruition so rapidly, and with such force, that the profundity is all-consuming. That is life’s work.

One way to prevent conversation from being boring is to say the wrong thing.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

One thing I can say about the French language is that no one in the world loves their language as much as they do.

[On Italian:] One may almost call it a language that talks of itself, and always seems more witty than its speakers.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

Only in North America is it regarded as a major achievement to speak one language moderately well.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.