Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.

So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves.

Some people use language as a mask. And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not.

Some people us language to describe the lives they lead, and other people use language to create the lives they lead.

Some people say they don’t believe in God, but they believe in an energy that moves through all living things. Others say they do believe in God, and they claim God is an energy moving through all living things. Some people believe in a holy book, and their faith gives them the same feeling of certainty that sustains people of other faiths as well as non-believers. Over this, we start wars.

Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they're more "open to new experiences" than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that's bound up in our native language, a "language ego", which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.

Some things should never be said. Not out loud in clear, simple words. You talk around them. You leave gaps and blanks. You use other words and talk in curves and arcs for the worst things because you need to keep them like mist. Words are dangerous. Like a spell, if you name the mist, call out all of the words that describe it sharp and clear, you turn it solid, into something that no one should ever hold in their hands. Better that it stays like water, slipping between your fingers.

Sometimes a person who is utterly devoid of charm will try to create a good impression by using very elegant language; yet he only succeeds in being ridiculous.

Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk.

Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, "Gentlemen, let's proceed," and sensing Ellie's frown would add, "Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys." The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female.

So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They that understand the meaning of language understand language and life better!

Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.

Sometimes, in rare occasions, when I see a man respects a woman, treats her like another valuable human being, uses a proper language when talking to her and does not consider her only as a sex-toy. I feel proud of being a man. I feel grateful of belonging to a gender category as he is. However, the feeling is soon gone after seeing how men in general talk about women, disrespect them and insult them any way they can.

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.

Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

Sometimes we speak different languages, but our hearts are the same.

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.

Speak the words that will free you. Express yourself.

...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.

, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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’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 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.

...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.

Souls speak with each other through poetry!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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