Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

Čeština je krásná řeč. Ona má obrovskou plejádu slov pro obyčejný věci. Třeba kulaťoučké jablíčko. To neřeknete jinou řečí. Angličan musí říct “a litte round apple“, malé kulaté jablko…. Tomu přece chybí barva i vůně.

Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices.

Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation.

Changing your words can change your world.

Chromosomes. Sex. Grasshoppers. "Pick me up, Mommy." This is an odd list, except in the eye of evolution. For in the major developments in the history of life, the ability to say, "Pick me up, Mommy" features prominently along with the emergence of genes, sexual reproduction, and multicellular organisms. On a smaller but no less wondrous scale, the ability to speak opens one mind to another. Babies announce their arrival with a loud cry, but it is their first words that launch the journey of a lifetime.

Cine mută vorbele dintr-o limbă într-alta își lasă sufletul pe mâna diavolului (...) Că până tu te gândești și la o vorbă, și la cealaltă, duhul tău stă, nehotărât, pe deasupra vorbelor, mut și neterminat, și nu știe de-i albă ori neagră. Iar cine știe o limbă cu sufletul n-o poate ști pe ailaltă decât cu mintea.

Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.

Clover['s] eyes are full of language.

Come let’s defy. Even if silence is noble, let’s speak. Without words. In the language of Love.

Comment sections on the internet are like gang graffiti, abusive words sprayed like gibberish and it's ugly to look at.

Communication is not so much about what you say, as what you don't say.

Consciousness ("here" and "now") is not "false and misleading" because of language; consciousness is language, and nothing else, because it is false and misleading.

Consider the term Mother Tongue. In Russian the term is Rodnoi-yazyk, which means Nearest or Dearest Tongue. At a pinch one could call it Darling Tongue. Mother Tongue is our first language, first heard as infants from the mouths of our mothers. Hence the logic of the term. I mention it now because the creature of language, which i'm trying to describe, is undoubtedly feminine. I imagine its centre as a phonetic uterus. Within one Mother Tongue are all Mother Tongues. Or, to put it another way: every Mother Tongue is universal.

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternatives to America were actively considered -Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Freeds or Fredes)- but none mustered sufficient support to displace the existing name.

Contentment can only be found in not envying others or comparing yourself to them but in being satisfied with what you have.

Conversation, like good reading, nourishes.

Crews that fight forest fires in Oregon are now so heavily Hispanic that in 2003, the Oregon Department of Forestry required that crew chiefs be bilingual. In 2006, the department started forcing out veterans. Jaime Pickering, who used to run a squad of 20 firefighters, says the rule means “job losses for Americans—the white people.” Zita Wilensky, a 16-year veteran, was the only white employee of Miami-Dade County Domestic Violence Unit. Her co-workers made fun of her and called her gringa and Americana. Miss Wilensky says her boss gave her 60 days to learn Spanish, and fired her when she failed to do so. It is increasingly common, therefore, for Americans to be penalized because they cannot speak Spanish, but employers who insist that workers speak English are guilty of discrimination. In 2001, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forced a small Catholic college in San Antonio to pay $2.4 million to housekeepers who were required to speak English at work. There are now about 45 million Hispanics in the country. What will the status of Spanish be when there are 130 million Hispanics, as the Census Bureau projects for 2050? In 2000, President Bill Clinton decided that the prohibition against discrimination because of “national origin” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant that if a foreigner cannot speak to a government agency in his own language he is a victim. Executive Order 13166 required all local governments that receive federal money (all of them, essentially) to translate official documents into any language spoken by at least 3,000 people in the area or 10 percent of the local population. It also required interpreters for non-English speakers. In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that hospitals alone would spend $268 million every year implementing Executive Order 13166, and state departments of motor vehicles would spend $8.5 million. OMB estimated that communicating with food stamp recipients who don’t speak English would cost $25.2 million per year.

Dad says there are more than three thousand letters in the Japanese alphabet, which could pose a problem. There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and I get into enough trouble with them as it is.

Culture is critical in marriage because in a real sense, culture is the behavioral expression of one's values, appreciations, tastes, and relational style in both simple and serious matters of life. Add to this the dimensions of language and cultural memory, and you have worlds within worlds. In effect, culture provides the how and why of an individual's behavior.

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.

Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary...

Dance is the language of artistic kinesis.

Dancing is swearing in an unknown language.

Czy więc nic nigdy nie może zostać naprawdę wyrażone, oddane w swoim stawaniu się anonimowym, nikt nigdy nie zdoła oddać bełkotu rodzącej się chwili, jak to jest, że, urodzeni z chaosu nie możemy nigdy z nim się zetknąć, zaledwie spojrzymy, a już pod naszym spojrzeniem rodzi się porządek... i kształt...

Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.

Das habe ich von meiner Großmutter gelernt: Daß man durch die Macht der Worte den Krieg nicht nur beginnen, sondern auch gewinnen kann.

Das Recht ist kein Kreißsaal für die Gerechtigkeit und hat niemals behauptet, einer zu sein. Das Recht besteht aus Gesetzen, Gesetze bestehen aus Wörtern, und Wörter können manches sein, sicher aber nicht gerecht.

Day starting with a smile leads you to that place where even imagination is quite hard. Smile and make your day bright since the beauty of smile is priceless and its a language that all the people around world can understand.

Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair.

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112) They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity?

De todos los idiomas europeos el que resulta más difícil de hablar bien a mi entender es sin duda el español, tal es su riqueza de palabras, rotaciones lingüísticas y belleza expresiva. Ocurre sin embargo que tan pocas personas conocen lo que dicen, son tan escasas las que manejan por completo el inmenso vocabulario de esta excepcional lengua, tan selectas las que entienden sus innumerables giros y tiempos verbales, que parece simple y sencillo a primera vista.

Die Rache der Sprache ist das Gedicht

Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins.

Das Problem mit Fremdsprachen [...], wenn man sie nicht zumindest stiefmuttersprachlich beherrschte, war, dass man immer nur sagt, was man sagen kann, und nicht, was man sagen will. Die Differenz ist das Niemandsland zwischen den Grenzen der Welt.

Death is only a translation of life into another language.

Despite this inundation of rape imagery, where we are immersed in a rape culture—one that is overly permissive toward all manner of sexual violence—not enough victims of gang rape speak out about the toll the experience exacts. The right stories are not being told, or we’re not writing enough about the topic of rape in the right ways. Perhaps we too casually use the term “rape culture” to address the very specific problems that rise from a culture mired in sexual violence. Should we, instead, focus on “rapist culture” because decades of addressing “rape culture” has accomplished so little?

Die deutsche Sprache ist die Sprache der schweren Wörter

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.

does our relational language, already imbued with oppressive cultural meaning-making, necessarily preclude the possibility of speaking about freedom? How can you speak about freedom if you can't speak freely? Does the way that we talk about this problem make a difference in how we try to solve it? Does the question as I've phrased it fail to adequately exhaust the possibilities?

Does that new man in your life call his ex "a slut", "a whore", "a bitch", "psycho" , "crazy", "a nutter" etc etc. Chances are, whatever he's calling his ex right now, he'll be calling you when things don't go his way. Be warned.

Dolores seems to dwell only just inside language, she makes sentences the way a potter works clay, squashing them any which way into shapes that please her.

Don't live by your thoughts only; live by your words also. Whatever plans you think about, affirm it in your mouth first, declare it and you will succeed in working it out! Words can be powerful!

Don't allow yourself to be fooled by how "nice" a person appears to be, measure a person's virtuousness by the way in which they treat others with their words and actions .

Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.

Don't you find it odd that two of the foremost symptoms of insanity are the hearing voices and talking to oneself? Is it any wonder that language is an area of such interest in psychology? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)

Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.

Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.