Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

The guitarist is dependent on the guitar, which is dependent upon the creation, which is dependent on whatever creative forces or realities are responsible for its existence. If you call this creative force or reality "God," then art really could be thought of as the language God speaks. All art is rooted in whatever is the foundation of everything.

The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal'ia'iou'amaa'aaa'eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night.

The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests.

The Holy Bible is the Spirit of God exposed to humanity in the Language of Heaven.

The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.

The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though, that there are some French words that I have picked up quickly, in fact, words that I cannot remember not knowing. As if I had been born with them in my mouth, as if they were seeds of a sour fruit that someone else ate and then ungraciously stuffed its remains into my mouth.

The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.

The language I learned was pretty, full of passivity and silence. I had no proper language for the issues of blood and anger, yet much of what went on when I was a child made me angry. There were no words a nice girl could use to describe anger; her options were to remain silent or to use indiscreet language, the kind that curls in a room like smoke and soon disappears. We girls were taught to speak safely and to bandage our anger with polite, pretty words. We might talk about the anger only in questions and sighs, unable to curse, yell or break windows in the beautiful garden.

The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.

The language we use is extremely powerful. It is the frame through which we perceive and describe ourselves and our picture of the world.

The language of a river inscribes over eyes of moths and flies the navel of the land is a lake.

The language of mathematics differs from that of everyday life, because it is essentially a rationally planned language. The languages of size have no place for private sentiment, either of the individual or of the nation. They are international languages like the binomial nomenclature of natural history. In dealing with the immense complexity of his social life man has not yet begun to apply inventiveness to the rational planning of ordinary language when describing different kinds of institutions and human behavior. The language of everyday life is clogged with sentiment, and the science of human nature has not advanced so far that we can describe individual sentiment in a clear way. So constructive thought about human society is hampered by the same conservatism as embarrassed the earlier naturalists. Nowadays people do not differ about what sort of animal is meant by Cimex or Pediculus, because these words are used only by people who use them in one way. They still can and often do mean a lot of different things when they say that a mattress is infested with bugs or lice. The study of a man's social life has not yet brought forth a Linnaeus. So an argument about the 'withering away of the State' may disclose a difference about the use of the dictionary when no real difference about the use of the policeman is involved. Curiously enough, people who are most sensible about the need for planning other social amenities in a reasonable way are often slow to see the need for creating a rational and international language.

The language of sword is less powerful than the language of word, but most of the people understand the language of sword with greater power than the language of word.

The language of the heart Is the only language That everybody can understand.

The language we use can subtly influence our thinking. […] On the face of it, the term “web platform” seems harmless. Describing the web as a platform puts it on par with other software environments. Flash was a platform. Android is a platform. iOS is a platform. But the web is not a platform. The whole point of the web is that it is cross‐platform.

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

The language of light can only be decoded by the heart. Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them.

The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.

The language of love is the only language understood but not spoken the world over.

The language of nature is silence.

The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is botulism. Sausages may taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

The linguistic system represented in the mind-brain gives some account of everything submitted to it: good sentences, bad sentences, sentences in other languages, ums and ahs, coughs; perhaps -Chomsky suggests- even to non-linguistic events like a squeaking door.

The limits of your language are the limits of your world.

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

The locust has no king Just noise and hard language They talk me over

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

The Minotaur lacks confidence in his penmanship. Over time the Minotaur has learned to read, has even been able to make the slow laborious transition from one language to another as cultures die off and fade away as he moves from place to place. But the Minotaur has never been able to rise above rudimentary skills. Most books seem ridiculously small, and the physical act of finding a comfortable sight line over his massive snout frustrates him. Nevertheless the Minotaur is haunted by the idea that books and reading might make those vast stretches of time that loom before him more bearable.

The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.

The manner of Hamann's writing here is also part of the argument. The rhetorical aspect cannot, as we saw above, just be subtracted in order to arrive at 'the argument'. Hamann enacts his suspicion of the reduction of philosophical language to abstract foundations via his rhetorical verve. It should be apparent, then, that Hamann's position cannot be regarded as questionable just because of its employment of rhetoric. Whatever else one may think of it, the position is internally consistent. The attempt to rid philosophy of rhetoric falls prey precisely to the fact that what is involved in rhetoric is inherent in what is built into all natural languages by their genesis in the real historical world.

the most important things can't be lassoed with language. The most important things can only be felt.

The more clearly we are able to express ourselves, the less room there is for ambiguity. The more elaborate and the more precise our vocabulary, the greater the scope for thought and expression. Language is about subtlety and nuance. It is power and it is potent. We can woo with words and we can wound. Despots fear the words of the articulate opponent. Successful revolutions are achieved with words as much as with weapons.

The most elegant of the dialects belongs to those who know only one language, who do not mix with Persians and who do not customarily settle in other lands. Those who have two languages and who mix with the populace of the cities have a certain slurring in their utterances.

The most self-damaging words in the English language are: try, might, and if. These are words of uncertainty. Will you fail? That is possible. But continue doubting your abilities and you’ll never succeed.

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

The name one gives is inessential. What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by other name would smell as sweet.

Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

The nature of poems Is a matter of words and deeds An intimate encounter of voice In the ache of the heart In the labor of breathing A hesitant casting of eyes Away from the mundane to see That delicate and shiny thing In the oddly prosaic rock pile An extravagance of conceit An abundance of grace A prayer for words to speak

The next time you wish you could find the right words to say to someone who is hurting, just remember that dogs are a man's best friend without ever speaking a word to them. Simply be present and have sympathy.

Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud, 'This blows ass.' She nods sympathetically. She doesn't understand, but of course, in her way she understands completely.

The next night, alone in the tent, Laurent said: 'As we draw closer to the border, I think it would be safer--more private--to hold our discussions in your language rather than mine.' He said it in carefully pronounced Akielon. Damen stared at him, feeling as though the world had just been rearranged. 'What is it?' said Laurent. 'Nice accent,' said Damen, because despite everything, the corner of his mouth was beginning helplessly to curve up. [...] It was of course no surprise to find that Laurent had a well-stocked armoury of elegant phrases and bitchy remarks, but could not talk in detail about anything sensible.

The only justification for the application of NLP patterns is the creation of choice and precisely in the context in which choice presently does not exist.

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.” Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

The nurturing of moral is the language, and control of the ego is the eye of the soul.

The official JLPT guide states that JLPT N3 level is roughly equivalent to Japanese Grades 1 through 4 in terms of kanji and vocabulary content with approximately 650 Kanji made up of Grade 1 (80), Grade 2 (160) Grade 3 (200) and Grade 4 (200) and 3750 vocabulary