Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

I think it's often easier to theorize in the official codes of theory rather than to theorize lightly through scene, object, story, and incident in ways that keeps alive the sensual serendipities of language. This is not a question of being for or against theory, but rather of being suspicious of orthodoxies that concede, in advance, that what passes for theory must be signaled by a narrowing of diction, sentence rhythms, and sensual awareness. I'm in favor of surprise.

I think the one thing humans are is language wizards.

I think yes is the most beautiful and necessary word in the English language.

I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

I thought it was respectful to each country to sing in their language.

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.

I think when we engage in language we are engaging in something that is specifically and primally human.

It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

It is by metaphor that language grows.

It is clear that whatever language of democracy Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.

It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.

It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people.

It is one of those things that is universally connectable, people can connect to it from everywhere; music is like that universal language.

It is part of the business of marketing to muddy the distinction between altruism and cynicism.

It is nonsense for the Government to allow any loopholes for religious homophobia. Bigotry is bigotry whether it's dressed up in the language of faith or not.

It is the theory that decides what can be observed.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.

It is wrong to use equal language for unequal actions.

It makes no sense to bad mouth people, but I think Jean-Luc Godard is astonishing as a survivalist, somebody who can do a film that is as extraordinary as Goodbye to Language.

It is the distance between us that creates language.

It is not the responsibility of the language to force good looking code, but the language should make good looking code possible.

It makes sense to me that the polyglot wouldn't know what language he dreamed in.

It must be powerful language if you canna make oout what the heel it’s goin’ on aboot!

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set.

It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.

I try for a poetic language that says, This is who we are, where we have been, where we are. This is where we must go. And this is what we must do.

It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.

It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

It seemed to me as if the stones sang, in the strangest voices, in the language of Ultima Thule.

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel once. I'm bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.

It's a kind of liberation to break free in language, if you can break free, but it's also a confinement, because form confines you - whatever the form.

It's always a unique challenge when you're working with somebody where English is their second language.

It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.