Quotes and Sayings about Language
"Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone."
- F. Murray Abraham
(Related: Actor, English, Language, Man, Now, Talk, Trying)
"It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable."
- M. H. Abrams
(Related: Age, Country, Shakespeare)
"And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation."
- Kathy Acker
(Related: Expectation, Language, Trying)
"I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way."
- Kathy Acker
(Related: Being, Language)
"A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically."
- Diane Ackerman
(Related: Lie, Emotions, Language, Moods)
"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies."
- Theodor Adorno
(Related: Hunger, Language, Poor, Words)
"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it."
- Theodor Adorno
(Related: History, Language)
"Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt."
- Peter Agre
(Related: Camping, Language, Russia, School)
"It is wrong to use equal language for unequal actions."
- Peter Akinola
(Related: Actions, Language, Wrong)
"As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again."
- Josef Albers
(Related: Time, Language, Rules, Will)
"I lived in England to learn English. When I went to England for the first time, it was like being on the Moon. I had no friends, I couldn't speak the language. I was very isolated."
- Jean Alesi
(Related: Time, Being, EnglEnglish, First, Friends, Language, Moon)
"Instrumental music can spread the international language."
- Herb Alpert
(Related: Music, Language)
"No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language."
- Fisher Ames
(Related: Bible, Being, Language, Purity)
"We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life."
- David Amram
(Related: Beauty, Dreams, Life, Love, Family, Country, Jazz, Language, Leading, Living)
"Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Language, Meaning, Years)
"I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature."
- Jean-Jacques Annaud
(Related: Movies, Mistake, Language, Literature)
"When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies."
- Jean-Jacques Annaud
(Related: Movies, Language)
"The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second."
- Jean-Jacques Annaud
(Related: Art, Language)
"You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels."
- David Antin
(Related: Money, Choice, Language)
"When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience."
- David Antin
(Related: Experience, Family)
"From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us."
- David Antin
(Related: Gods, Entertainment, Language, May)
"I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand."
- Edward Appleton
(Related: Language, Mind, Opera)
"The Catholic faith never changes. But the language and mode of manifesting this one faith can change according to peoples, times and places."
- Francis Arinze
(Related: Change, Faith, Language)
"High thoughts must have high language."
- Aristophanes
(Related: Thoughts, Language)
"In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech."
- Aristotle
(Related: First, Language, Persuasion, Speech, Study)
"Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors."
- Rudolf Arnheim
(Related: Art, Language, Talk, Theory)
"All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth."
- Antonin Artaud
(Related: Language)
"The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!"
- John Astin
(Related: English, Language, Will)
"War is what happens when language fails."
- Margaret Atwood
(Related: War, Language)
"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
- W. H. Auden
(Related: Love, Language)
"Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing."
- J. L. Austin
(Related: Language, Word)
"The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing."
- Roger Babson
(Related: Language, Nothing, Saying)
"A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language."
- Gaston Bachelard
(Related: Beauty, Language)
"Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language."
- Gaston Bachelard
(Related: Poetry, Future, Language, Speech)
"I would have thought it possible to choose delegates for these larger conferences who, even if they could not speak the principal languages, could at least understand them or could have friends seated beside them who could keep them informed on essential points."
- Fredrik Bajer
(Related: Thought, Friends)
"We must examine then the concerns of the Government of Japan about the language of the treaty itself - of SOFA - and of the interim and further arrangements that have been made since 1995, and see whether or not we need to make any changes. Those are decisions I cannot make."
- Howard Baker
(Related: Government, Decisions, Language)
"Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."
- James A. Baldwin
(Related: Truth, Control, Language, Universe)
"The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?"
- Hugo Ball
(Related: Paradise, Language)
"Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute."
- J. G. Ballard
(Related: Science, Technology)
"Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really."
- Balthus
(Related: Language, Painting)
"I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre."
- Howard Barker
(Related: Language, Shakespeare, Theatre)
"It is time for dead languages to be quiet."
- Natalie Clifford Barney
(Related: Time, Quiet)
"To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Love, Language)
"Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Power, Forget, Language, Legislation, Speech)
"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Desire, Language, Words)
"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction."
- Gregory Bateson
(Related: Language)
"To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery."
- Charles Baudelaire
(Related: Language, Practice)
"Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter."
- Charles Baudelaire
(Related: Religion, Language, Liberty, Man)
"If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity."
- Jean Baudrillard
(Related: Love, Infidelity, Language)
"Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence."
- Jean Baudrillard
(Related: Innocence, Language, Pleasure)
"I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn."
- Stephanie Beacham
(Related: Language)
"No language is rude that can boast polite writers."
- Aubrey Beardsley
(Related: Language, Writers)
"Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand."
- Aphra Behn
(Related: Money, Language, Nations, Sense)
"Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language."
- Hilaire Belloc
(Related: History, Life, Effect, Language, Nationalism, Question, Religious)
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
- Robert Benchley
(Related: English, Language, Nothing)
"Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language."
- William Bennett
(Related: Children, English, Language)
"Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas."
- Eric Bentley
(Related: Age, Ideas, Language, Principles)
"One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man."
- John Berger
(Related: Home, Language, Man)
"There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Language, Nothing, Philosophy)
"Writers let themselves be enticed by the language."
- Peter Bichsel
(Related: Language, Writers)
"I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: Chance, Fighting, Language)
"Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: Age, Being, Country, Language, Risk)
"No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: Art, Language, Past)
"In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: History, Art, Language, Painting, Play, Song, World)
"Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world."
- Augustine Birrell
(Related: Books, Haste, Language, Man, Pressure, Taste, World, Years)
"I woke up find a rather noisy multi-lingual meeting going on. This was great as everyone could participate and even though everything had to be translated into about four different languages it never became boring. After a while the meeting broke up and everyone went for food."
- John Blair
(Related: Food, Meeting)
"Now, mark it. This may be strong language, but heed it. The people mean it, and, my friends of the Eastern Democracy, we bid farewell when you do that thing."
- Richard Parks Bland
(Related: People, Democracy, Friends, Language, May, Now)
"Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage."
- Harold Bloom
(Related: Shakespeare)
"Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas."
- Bodhidharma
(Related: Body, Language, Senses)
"Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier."
- Louise Bogan
(Related: Ideas, Language)
"My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc."
- David Bohm
(Related: Feelings, Language, Mind, Order, State)
"When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images."
- Niels Bohr
(Related: Poetry, Atoms, Facts, Language)
"You have to learn the language of Hamlet."
- Edward Bond
(Related: Language)
"The one overall structure in my plays is language."
- Edward Bond
(Related: Language)
"The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature."
- Emma Bonino
(Related: Knowledge, Literature, University)
"I'm not a lawyer, and maybe I should have used more specific legal language."
- Sonny Bono
(Related: Legal, Language)
"In general, every country has the language it deserves."
- Jorge Luis Borges
(Related: Country, Language)
"Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Thought, Difficulties, Language)
"Language is a mixture of statement and evocation."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Language)
"Certainly, because the computer and computer language was still not as common as it is today. That's one of the reasons I believe Tron wasn't as popular back then as it is today."
- Bruce Boxleitner
(Related: Computer, Language, Popular, Today)
"We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense."
- Andrew Coyle Bradley
(Related: Folly, Language, Selfishness, Sense, Tyranny, Violence)
"There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them."
- Kenneth Branagh
(Related: Actors, Language, Shakespeare)
"Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves."
- Kenneth Branagh
(Related: Experience, Music, People, Actors, Language, Meaning, Want, Words)
"Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks."
- Jimmy Breslin
(Related: English, Language, Past)
"The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury."
- John Bright
(Related: Knowledge, Luxury)
"Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language."
- Joseph Brodsky
(Related: Language, World)
"A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state."
- Joseph Brodsky
(Related: Language, State)
"For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance."
- Joseph Brodsky
(Related: Life, Time, Boredom, Language)
"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language."
- Joseph Brodsky
(Related: Patriotism, Attitude, Language, Writer)
"Even if you didn't see the movie, you'd see two words you'd never seen put together before - comedy and Muslim. Comedy is friendly - it's the least offensive word in our language."
- Albert Brooks
(Related: Muslim, Comedy, Language, Word, Words)
"Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words."
- Gwendolyn Brooks
(Related: Life, Language, Wonders, Words)
"I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Language)
"Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides."
- Rita Mae Brown
(Related: Power, Language, Moon, Tides)
"Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?"
- Jackson Browne
(Related: English, Language)
"To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language."
- William C. Bryant
(Related: Love, Nature, Language)
"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language."
- Martin Buber
(Related: Power, Eyes, Language)
"People come from around the world and can understand each other without even speaking the same languages!"
- Sergei Bubka
(Related: People, World)
"Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated."
- Thomas Bulfinch
(Related: Knowledge, Language, Literature, Mythology)
"Body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words."
- Deborah Bull
(Related: Body, Conversation, Language, Speech, Words)
"And I have to work so hard at talking positively to myself. If I don't, it's just real hard to get through the day, and I'll get really down, and just want to cry. My whole body language changes. I get more slumped over."
- Delta Burke
(Related: Work, Body, Day, Language, Talking, Want)
"Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language."
- Kenneth Burke
(Related: Nature, Purpose, Language, Light, Principles)
"Language is a virus from outer space."
- William S. Burroughs
(Related: Language, Space)
"We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans."
- Mangosuthu Buthelezi
(Related: History, People, Culture, Destiny, Language)
"My least favorite phrase in the English language is "I don't care.""
- James Caan
(Related: Care, English, Favorite, Language)
"Nor do I think that any other nation than this of Wales, nor any other language, whatever may hereafter come to pass, shall on the day of severe examination before the Supreme Judge, answer for this corner of the earth."
- Giraldus Cambrensis
(Related: Day, Earth, Examination, Language, May)
"It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with."
- James Cameron
(Related: Time, Act, Actors)
"There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth."
- Elias Canetti
(Related: Death, Dying, Earth, Language, Today, Ugly)
"Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music."
- Frank Capra
(Related: Music, Film, Mathematics)
"You who speak languages, you are such liars."
- Orson Scott Card
""I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?"
- George Carlin
(Related: English, Language)
"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth."
- George Carlin
(Related: Truth, Language)
"Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Devil, Language, Now, Reason, Sarcasm)
"When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well."
- Marcel Carne
(Related: Italy, Language, Trouble, Understanding, Years)
"Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience."
- Dale Carnegie
(Related: Purpose, Detail, Language)
"I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born."
- Emily Carr
(Related: Language, Learning, Sound)
"Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that."
- John le Carre
(Related: Fools, Language, Linguists)
"Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries."
- Jimmy Carter
(Related: Love, Music, Nature, Art, Language)
"Faith is more basic than language or theology."
- Sydney Carter
(Related: Faith, Language, Theology)
"It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language."
- David Chalmers
(Related: Language, Scientists)
"A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one."
- Oswald Chambers
(Related: Men, Language, Sense)
"The language you are about to hear... is disturbing."
- Dave Chappelle
(Related: Language)
"To have another language is to possess a second soul."
- Charlemagne
(Related: Soul, Language)
"Our language is the reflection of ourselves. A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers."
- Cesar Chavez
(Related: Character, Growth, Language, Reflection)
"I am calling attention just to the main points of these tremendously important matters, which can be understood better by pious meditation than explained by human language."
- Martin Chemnitz
(Related: Attention, Language, Meditation)
"The radio was my big influence. Comedy came from the instinctual feel I had for language."
- Dominic Chianese
(Related: Comedy, Influence, Language)
"So women are at the beginning of building a language, and not all women are conscious of it."
- Judy Chicago
(Related: Women, Beginning, Building, Language)
"The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos."
- Lydia M. Child
(Related: Genius, Expression, Eye, Language)
"If our language, our programs, our creations are not strongly present in the new media, the young generation of our country will be economically and culturally marginalized."
- Jacques Chirac
(Related: Country, Language, Media, Present, Will)
"Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world."
- Noam Chomsky
(Related: Language, World)
"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."
- Noam Chomsky
(Related: Creation, Language, Laws, Principles, Words)
"Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful."
- Carol P. Christ
(Related: Being, Language)
"You need to find somebody who will speak the same language. We understand that we couldn't have any kind of discussion without permission, without a legal framework behind it."
- Anatoly Chubais
(Related: Legal, Language, Will)
"Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used."
- Alonzo Church
(Related: Language, Logic, Mathematics)
"I had a quick ear and could pick up languages."
- Diane Cilento
(Related: Quick)
"We inhabit a language rather than a country."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Country, Language)
"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Country, Language)
"The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language."
- Jim Clark
(Related: Internet, Language)
"Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone."
- John Clayton
(Related: English, Language)
"Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language."
- Lucille Clifton
(Related: Poetry, Life, Language)
"Bunny boiler is now part of our language, and I'm proud of that."
- Glenn Close
(Related: Language, Now)
"Scientific research and other studies have demonstrated that arts education can enhance American students' math and language skills and improve test scores which in turn increase chances of higher education and good jobs in the future."
- Thad Cochran
(Related: Education, American, Future, Jobs, Language, Research, Students)
"Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?"
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Lady, Language, Limits, Writing)
"My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters."
- Bram Cohen
(Related: Favorite, Language, Support)
"Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered."
- Leonard Cohen
(Related: Language, Man, Prayer)
"I think foreign countries really do like it when American artists sing in their language. And when you go over there and say, 'Hi, how are you?' in their language, they love it. It makes them feel like you're doing it just for them. We in America take so much for granted."
- Natalie Cole
(Related: Love, America, American, Artists, Countries, Language)
"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Imagination, Language)
"Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Future, Language, Mind, Past, Weapons)
"On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say."
- Phil Collins
(Related: Work, Day, English, Language)
"It's always been easy with Mark, he's a rock fan and we speak the same language. He's a big Beatles fan too. We worked a lot via CLI calls, though only meeting up once every couple of months."
- Phil Collins
(Related: Language, Meeting, Months)
"I do that in whatever language of the country I'm in, because the audience appreciate it."
- Phil Collins
(Related: Country, Language)
"Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion."
- John Comenius
(Related: Religion, Consideration, End, Humanity, Language, Nationality, Selfishness, Welfare)
"Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Family, Nature, Language, Man, Quarrel)
"To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot."
- Joseph Conrad
(Related: Time, Man, Talking, Words, World)
"Though language forms the preacher, 'Tis good works make the man."
- Eliza Cook
(Related: Language, Man)
"Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Language)
"The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms."
- James F. Cooper
(Related: Abuse, Ambition, American, Effect, Faults, Language, Simplicity, Want)
"Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language."
- Eric Allin Cornell
(Related: Travel, Language, Learning)
"Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic."
- Eric Allin Cornell
(Related: Chess, Language, Programming, School)
"I don't know what 'operational control' of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that's not true. We do not have operational control."
- John Cornyn
(Related: Control, English, Language)
"French was my first language."
- Bob Cousy
(Related: First, Language)
"Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings."
- Alex Cox
(Related: Time, Conservative, English, Language, Shakespeare, Writer)
"Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square."
- Alex Cox
(Related: Politics, English, Language, Shakespeare)
"I think one of the best words in the English language is compassion. I think it holds everything. It holds love, it holds care... and if everybody just did something. We all make a difference."
- Michael Crawford
(Related: Love, Care, Compassion, Difference, English, Language, Words)
"Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to."
- David Cronenberg
(Related: History, Religion, Cinema, Culture, Language, Literary, Want)
"It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion."
- Rene Daumal
(Related: Goal, Clarity, Confusion, Content, Language)
"The repeal of racist language in the Constitution of Alabama was and still is a necessary step in the state's ability to progress."
- Artur Davis
(Related: Progress, Ability, Constitution, Language, State)
"I wish I was not such a very bad hand at languages. That is one thing I cannot do, that and ride."
- Richard H. Davis
"Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking."
- Humphry Davy
(Related: Thought, Language, Thinking)
"The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language."
- Christopher Dawson
(Related: Language, Understanding)
"For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity."
- Christopher Dawson
(Related: Men, Nature, Blood, Class, Culture, Human nature, Humanism, Humanity, Language, Limitations)
"Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning."
- John W. Dawson
(Related: American, Meaning, Now, Senses, Words)
"If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Language, Want, Writing)
"The most heroic word in all languages is revolution."
- Eugene V. Debs
(Related: Revolution, Word)
"Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself."
- Eugene Delacroix
(Related: Soul, Language, Will)
"Painting is by nature a luminous language."
- Robert Delaunay
(Related: Nature, Language, Painting)
"The language of my books has shaped me as a man."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Books, Language, Man)
"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."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Truth, Integrity, Language, Writer)
"I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Beauty, Inspiration, Fiction, Influence, Language)
"True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Vision, Consciousness, Deep, Language, Terror, Writers)
"Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate."
- John Denham
(Related: Poetry, Language, Spirit, Will)
"It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me."
- Bo Derek
(Related: Grammar, Language, Learning, Word)
"The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages."
- Jacques Derrida
(Related: First, Media)
"No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language."
- Jacques Derrida
(Related: Language)
"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen."
- Jacques Derrida
(Related: Language)
"In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it."
- Jacques Derrida
(Related: Dream, Language, Literature, Philosophy, Writing)
"Good music is very close to primitive language."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Music, Language)
"The Germans and I no longer speak the same language."
- Marlene Dietrich
(Related: Language)
"About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead."
- Edsger Dijkstra
"APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums."
- Edsger Dijkstra
(Related: Mistake, Future, Language, Perfection, Programming)
"Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language."
- Walt Disney
(Related: Communication, Inventions, Language)
"Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals."
- Walt Disney
(Related: Animals, Animation, Job, Language)
"Finality is not the language of politics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Politics, Language)
"When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language."
- John Donne
(Related: Language, Man)
"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Poetry, Language)
"I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Music, Poetry, Language)
"The idea of a language more simple than ours."
- John Dudley
(Related: Idea, Language)
"Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings."
- Carol Ann Duffy
(Related: Feelings, Language, Poets, Trying, Writing)
"The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Language, Writing)
"I was always influenced by language."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Language)
"I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Age, History, Culture, Language, Literature, Russia)
"I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out."
- Katherine Dunn
(Related: Age, Language, Magic, Trouble, Words)
"Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it."
- Andrea Dworkin
(Related: Language)
"Information comes through to me in 3 basic ways seen, hearing, and feeling the energy of the person that's crossed over. In which it is a symbolic type of language."
- John Edward
(Related: Energy, Feeling, Hearing, Information, Language)
"Keep a journal, and learn how to see how you as an individuals sees information so you can learn your own sign language. Meditate and practice psychic self defense and surrounding yourself with prayer."
- John Edward
(Related: Defense, Information, Language, Practice, Prayer, Self)
"That is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs - where he tries desperately to be a 'TV Dad,' to give advice and it's so pat it becomes ridiculous."
- Atom Egoyan
(Related: Dad, Advice, Film, Irony, Language)
"There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?"
- Barbara Ehrenreich
(Related: Fear, Purpose, English, Fun)
"Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Science, Ideas, Language, May)
"I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
(Related: Life, Language, Military, Profession, Sense, Today)
"Language is much closer to film than painting is."
- Sergei Eisenstein
(Related: Film, Language, Painting)
"Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?"
- Sergei Eisenstein
(Related: Ideas, Cinema, Language, Now, Painting, Theater)
"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."
- George Eliot
(Related: Language, Words)
"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Communication, Fire, Language, Living)
"Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Poetry, Time, Help, Language)
"All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis."
- Jacques Ellul
(Related: Nature, God, Fact, Language, Reason, Value, Word)
"Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Language, Will)
"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words."
- Paul Engle
(Related: Poetry, Power, Ideas, Emotions, Language, Skin, Words)
"My first language is Gaelic."
- Enya
(Related: First, Language)
"I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks."
- Joseph Epstein
(Related: People, Training)
"Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing."
- John Erskine
(Related: Music, Language, Sarcastic)
"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."
- Mari Evans
(Related: Language)
"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."
- Frantz Fanon
(Related: Civilization, Culture, Importance, Language, Support, Weight)
"The human face is the organic seat of beauty. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul."
- Eliza Farnham
(Related: Beauty, Experience, Life, Soul, Development, Language, Office, Study, Value, Will)
"I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be."
- Suzanne Farrell
(Related: Thought, People, Myths)
"That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions."
- Chow Yun Fat
(Related: Mother, Language)
"A different language is a different vision of life."
- Federico Fellini
(Related: Life, Vision, Language)
"In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system."
- Ralph Fiennes
(Related: Act, Film, First, Language)
"When I left Barcelona, staying in Spain was an important factor in my decision to join Madrid. I did not have to change country or learn a new language, adopt a different sort of lifestyle, and so on."
- Luis Figo
(Related: Change, Decision, Country, Language, Spain)
"For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not."
- Ian Hamilton Finlay
(Related: Poetry, Control, Feeling, Language)
"Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: English, Language, Living, Satisfaction, Words)
"Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Language)
"Well, maybe so, although I don't think I am particularly gifted in languages. In fact, oddly enough, it may have something to do with my being slow at languages."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Being, Fact, May)
"Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Language, Living)
"The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Imagination, Work, Language, Nothing, Question)
"The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Heart, Values, English, Language)
"That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Language, Literature)
"Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Language, Tongue, Tradition)
"Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Art, Work, Language, Now, Principles)
"Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Quality, Language, Poems, Wishes)
"Myspace alone has just over 80 million users and ranks as the sixth most popular English language website and the eighth most popular site in the world."
- Mike Fitzpatrick
(Related: English, Language, Popular, World)
"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Time, Dance, Language, Pity, Stars)
"I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Being, Key, Language)
"I love to laugh, it's my main thing. I love to abuse the English language."
- Dan Fogelberg
(Related: Love, Abuse, English, Language)
"If your kids attend school and grades are up that will make $1,000 contributions to some 10,000 kids across the country, are challenging kids to learn foreign languages or challenging kids to get summer jobs or seek summer enrichment opportunities?"
- Harold Ford
(Related: Country, Jobs, Kids, School, Summer, Will)
"Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved."
- Harrison Ford
(Related: Language)
"The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating."
- John M. Ford
(Related: Effect, Language)
"All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language."
- Richard Foreman
(Related: Thought, Performance, Actor, Language, Play)
"Singing beautiful melodies is one thing, but to deliver the text so that the people understand it, even in a foreign language, has to be worked at very hard."
- Maureen Forrester
(Related: People, Language, Singing)
"I wish that I spoke more languages. I speak a couple languages, but not well enough to really dub myself. French is really the only one, and it's a difficult thing."
- Jodie Foster
"As thy days, so shall thy strength be which, in modern language, may be translated as thy thoughts so shall thy life be."
- Emmet Fox
(Related: Life, Strength, Thoughts, Language, May)
"We wanted the language to feel fresh, fun, and rock solid."
- James Frank
(Related: Fun, Language)
"Bobby and I went through some old questionnaires about customer requirements for languages, then we compiled a new one and sent it out to a few dozen people we knew."
- James Frank
(Related: People, Customer, Old)
"The spoken form is in fact a very restrained representation of what is possible in the musical language."
- Robert Fripp
(Related: Fact, Language)
"Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language."
- Robert Fripp
(Related: Music, Debate, Language)
"The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language."
- Max Frisch
(Related: Difference, Language)
"We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have."
- Fred Frith
(Related: Music, Play, Songs)
"It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar."
- Fred Frith
(Related: Body, Grammar, Language, Learning, Vocabulary)
"Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world."
- Erich Fromm
(Related: Dreams, Language, Myths, World)
"I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance."
- Stephen Fry
(Related: Truth, Freedom, Language, Purity, Tolerance)
"The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said."
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
(Related: Being, Language)
"The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it."
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
(Related: Being, Language, Living, Self)
"Nothing exists except through language."
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
(Related: Language, Nothing)
"I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc."
- Howard Gardner
(Related: Content, Language, World, Years)
"Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring."
- Jesse James Garrett
(Related: Work, Building, Hard work, Testing)
"If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Information, Language, Writer, Writing)
"I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano."
- Gordon Getty
(Related: Poetry, English, Paris, Poems)
"The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise."
- Edward Gibbon
(Related: Choice, Exercise, Language, Mind, Style)
"My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language."
- Edward Gibbon
(Related: English, Language, Obscurity)
"Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye."
- William Gibson
(Related: Eye, Language, Light, Mind)
"Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language."
- Gail Godwin
(Related: Dreams, Language)
"My use of language is part and parcel of my message."
- Theo Van Gogh
(Related: Language)
"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures."
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Nature, Feeling, Language, Reality)
"I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha."
- Arthur Golden
(Related: Work, Mother, Father, College, Culture, Famous, Language, Man, School)
"Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket."
- William Golding
(Related: Experience, Language)
"The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'."
- Maxim Gorky
(Related: English, Language, Words)
"The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Inspiration, Innocence, Language, Writer)
"The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Purpose, Language, Treason, Unity)
"I dislike math, yet I respect and appreciate the fact that math is the language of the universe."
- Lucas Grabeel
(Related: Fact, Language, Respect, Universe)
"Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body."
- Martha Graham
(Related: Soul, Dance, Body, Language)
"A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen."
- Paul Graham
(Related: Thought, Language, Pen, Programming, Thinking)
"I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality."
- Morris Graves
(Related: Language, Reality)
"Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science."
- Robert Graves
(Related: Science, Forget, Language, Poets, Scientists)
"What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man."
- Stephen Greenblatt
(Related: Love, Poetry, Body, English, Language, Man, Remarkable, Shakespeare)
"First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him."
- Stephen Greenblatt
(Related: English, First, Language, Shakespeare, Words)
"Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively."
- Bill Griffith
(Related: People, Language)
"After using four different languages on an album, it's tough to decide which one I'm gonna actually learn to speak. I always study the lyric, make sure I know what I'm singing, and try to get the pronunciation as perfect as possible."
- Josh Groban
(Related: Singing, Study)
"And not only that but... when the station is completed, there will be an international crew made of astronauts coming from different cultural experiences, speaking different languages, but working together for a common goal."
- Umberto Guidoni
(Related: Goal, Will)
"Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me."
- Alma Guillermoprieto
(Related: People, Language, Talking)
"One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language."
- Alma Guillermoprieto
(Related: Society, Language)
"Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poetry, Deep, Feeling, Help, Language)
"With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will."
- Ernst Haas
(Related: Time, Impression, First, Language, Now, Past, Photography, Reality, Will)
"Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations."
- Jurgen Habermas
(Related: Religion, Disappointment, Fact, Language, May, Old, Today)
"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Literature, states, Study, Theory, United, Writing)
"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Language, Vocabulary)
"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Language, Sound, Tension)
"There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Example, Language, Students, Vocabulary, Writing)
"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Poetry, Time, Language, Living)
"I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally."
- Steve Hackett
(Related: Music, Language, Mind, Song)
"There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job."
- Conrad Hall
(Related: Colors, Infinite, Job, Language, Light, Shadows)
"Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language."
- Conrad Hall
(Related: Music, Infinite, Language, Possibilities)
"Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't."
- Edward T. Hall
(Related: Art, Fact, First, Man)
"We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture."
- Edward T. Hall
(Related: People, Culture, Help, Language)
"Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself."
- Johann G. Hamann
(Related: Ability, Language, Reason)
"Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? - The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language."
- Johann G. Hamann
(Related: Power, Experience, Language, Question, Right)
"Music happens to be an art form that transcends language."
- Herbie Hancock
(Related: Art, Music, Language)
"The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism."
- Elizabeth Hardwick
(Related: Power, Courtesy, Language, Military)
"Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not."
- G. H. Hardy
(Related: Ideas, Will)
"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs."
- Thomas Hardy
(Related: Men, Feelings, Language, Woman)
"Smiles are the language of love."
- David Hare
(Related: Love, Language, Smiles)
"An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity."
- David Hare
(Related: Language, Stupidity)
"No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Art, Poetry, Concern, Language, Originality)
"We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from."
- Debbie Harry
(Related: Music, People, Language)
"The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Language, Magnificence)
"Support for alternate languages will largely depend on the underlying OS."
- Bill Hayden
(Related: Support, Will)
"A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it."
- William Hazlitt
(Related: Language)
"Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else."
- William Hazlitt
(Related: Nature, Poetry, Heart, Contempt, Language, Respect)
"It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Work, Bible, English, Exaggeration, Influence, Language, Literature, Race, Shakespeare, Will)
"At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: English, Famous, Language, Literary, Monument)
"Language is the house of the truth of Being."
- Martin Heidegger
(Related: Truth, Being, Language)
"The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being."
- Martin Heidegger
(Related: Being, Language)
"Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."
- Martin Heidegger
(Related: Fact, Language, Man)
"Music is the soul of language."
- Max Heindel
(Related: Music, Soul, Language)
"Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death."
- Heinrich Heine
(Related: Death, People, Communism, Envy, Hunger, Language)
"The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language."
- Werner Heisenberg
(Related: Atoms, Language, Problems)
"I was very adept at acquiring languages."
- Anna Held
"Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you."
- Robert Henri
(Related: Help, Language, Old, Past, Right)
"On what rests the hope of the republic? One country, one language, one flag!"
- Alexander Henry
(Related: Hope, Country, Language)
"We need a president who's fluent in at least one language."
- Buck Henry
(Related: Language, President)
"When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, sir, was the primary object."
- Patrick Henry
(Related: America, American, Language, Liberty, Spirit, Youth)
"Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families."
- Keith Henson
(Related: Family, Lie, Children, Language, Learning, Tradition)
"Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health."
- George Herbert
(Related: Health, Love, Mistake, Wealth, Language, Nothing)
"The eyes have one language everywhere."
- George Herbert
(Related: Eyes, Language)
"Tears are the noble language of the eye."
- Robert Herrick
(Related: Eye, Language, Tears)
"Actually, my correspondent's language is better than mine. He can put his sentiment into words."
- Alfred Day Hershey
(Related: Language, Sentiment, Words)
"Music is a great energizer. It's a language everybody knows."
- Bill Hicks
(Related: Music, Language)
"Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating."
- Gilbert Highet
(Related: Language, Living)
"The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words."
- Hippocrates
(Related: Virtue, Language, Nothing, Words)
"I'm not any good at foul language or anything like that."
- Thora Hird
(Related: Language)
"Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history."
- Russell Hoban
(Related: History, Effort, Language)
"After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?"
- Russell Hoban
(Related: People, Language, Right)
"Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information."
- Dee Hock
(Related: Information, Language)
"My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything."
- Howard Hodgkin
(Related: Language)
"The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist."
- Eric Hoffer
(Related: Leader, Language, Talk)
"Never impose your language on people you wish to reach."
- Abbie Hoffman
(Related: People, Language)
"I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Language, Want, Writing)
"I learned English, my sixth language at this point, quite quickly."
- Roald Hoffmann
(Related: English, Language)
"I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested in."
- Buddy Holly
(Related: Beauty, Language, Trying)
"To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry."
- John Andrew Holmes
(Related: Poetry, Language, Reading)
"Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: Soul, Thoughts, Blood, Language)
"The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened."
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
(Related: Age, Language)
"They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!"
- Harry Hopkins
(Related: God, People, Dumb, Fun, Language, Projects)
"Americans can pretty much sing anything, whereas foreign singers are often limited in style, language, even composer."
- Marilyn Horne
(Related: Americans, Language, Pretty, Style)
"Will you, my countrymen, the descendants of these men, warmed by their blood, inheriting their language, and having the principles for which they struggled confided to your care, allow them to be violated in your hands?"
- Joseph Howe
(Related: Men, Blood, Care, Language, Principles, Will)
"The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Genius, Ideas, Man)
"Language makes infinite use of finite media."
- Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
(Related: Infinite, Language, Media)
"When you're five years old, and you're running a business that people did not think there was room for, getting attention is not a bad thing. Letting it be known by whatever colorful language is necessary is not a bad thing."
- Brit Hume
(Related: Business, People, Attention, Language, Old, Running, Years)
"If the word 'No' was removed from the English language, Ian Paisley would be speechless."
- John Hume
(Related: English, Language, Word)
"I don't like jokes in speeches. I do like wit and humor. A joke is to humor what pornography is to erotic language in a good novel."
- James Humes
(Related: Humor, Jokes, Language, Pornography, Wit)
"The art of communication is the language of leadership."
- James Humes
(Related: Art, Leadership, Communication, Language)
"When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth."
- William H. Hunt
(Related: Truth, Language, Meaning, Spiritual, Teaching)
"The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language."
- Kim Hunter
(Related: Time, Language, Man)
"I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian."
- Michelle Hunziker
(Related: Mother, Father, Language, Luck, Parents, School)
"I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried."
- Douglas Hyde
(Related: Language)
"As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power."
- Douglas Hyde
(Related: Power, Culture, Influence, Language, Legends)
"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."
- Douglas Hyde
(Related: Irish, Language, Shame)
"Talk to people in their own language. If you do it well, they'll say, 'God, he said exactly what I was thinking.' And when they begin to respect you, they'll follow you to the death."
- Lee Iacocca
(Related: Death, People, Language, Respect, Talk, Thinking)
"With .NET once an API is published it's available to all programming languages at the same time."
- Miguel de Icaza
(Related: Time, Programming)
"In the GNOME project we tried to keep the platform language independent."
- Miguel de Icaza
(Related: Language, Project)
"Realistically, English is a universal language; it's the number one language for music and for communicating with the rest of the world."
- Enrique Iglesias
(Related: Music, English, Language, Rest, World)
"I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Country, England, Language)
"America's strength is not our diversity; our strength is our ability to unite people of different backgrounds around common principles. A common language is necessary to reach that goal."
- Ernest Istook
(Related: People, Goal, Strength, Ability, America, Diversity, Language, Principles)
"English should be our official language. Reading and speaking English are requirements to become a citizen."
- Ernest Istook
(Related: English, Language, Reading)
"Instead of this confusion, we need the unifying force of an official language, English, which is the language of success in America."
- Ernest Istook
(Related: Success, America, Confusion, English, Force, Language)
"Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and gaining the benefits that come from speaking English."
- Ernest Istook
(Related: Society, American, Benefits, English, Printing)
"But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense."
- Charles Ives
(Related: Music, Hope, Language, Man, May, Sense)
"I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965."
- Wanda Jackson
(Related: Language, Song, Titles)
"Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language."
- Roman Jakobson
(Related: Progress, Language, Meaning, Semantics, Study)
"Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language."
- Roman Jakobson
(Related: Language, Light, Speech)
"In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified."
- Roman Jakobson
(Related: Language, Sound, Value)
"Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."
- Henry James
(Related: English, Language, Summer, Words)
"Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth."
- Anna Jameson
(Related: Truth, Accuracy, Language)
"Language is memory and metaphor."
- Storm Jameson
(Related: Language, Memory, Metaphor)
"If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Poetry, America, Innovation, Language, Word)
"Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Vision, Language, Poets, Sense)
"The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life."
- Karl Jaspers
(Related: Life, Time, Language, Past)
"My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak."
- Elfriede Jelinek
(Related: Music, Example, Language, Meaning, Play, Sound, Training, Will, Words)
"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language."
- Elfriede Jelinek
(Related: Language, Prose)
"I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Guest, Language, Poems)
"I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Language, Parents, Writers)
"I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: People, Language)
"No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening."
- David Edward Jenkins
(Related: God, Language)
"Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne."
- Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
(Related: Science, History, Determination, Language, Name)
"Our culture, language, history, and values are vital to uniting us as a nation."
- Bobby Jindal
(Related: History, Values, Culture, Language, Nation)
"As we embrace the American dream and the freedoms it represents, we must also ensure that those who wish to enjoy those freedoms become a part of our society and learn to speak our language."
- Bobby Jindal
(Related: Society, Dream, American, Language)
"Science is the international language, so when we are able to convince countries that good decision-making for human health and animal health is based upon science, that's a real success story for us."
- Mike Johanns
(Related: Health, Science, Success, Decision, Countries, Language)
"In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts."
- Denis Johnson
(Related: Truth, Accuracy, Facts, Language, Prose, Trying)
"Language is the dress of thought."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Thought, Dress, Language)
"It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water."
- Franklin P. Jones
(Related: Language, Water, World)
"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language."
- James Earl Jones
(Related: Feelings, Thoughts, Ability, Drama, Language, Literature, Mind, Sermons)
"Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee."
- Ben Jonson
(Related: Language, Man, May)
"One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!"
- June Jordan
(Related: Thought, Colors, Students, Want)
"The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet."
- June Jordan
(Related: Music, Time, Language, Obvious, Writing)
"Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law."
- June Jordan
(Related: Sister, Brother, Habits, Language, Law, Lying, Schools, Self, Speech, Writing)
"If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power."
- Lionel Jospin
(Related: Power, Language)
"English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese."
- Abdul Kalam
(Related: Science, English, Present, Will)
"To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions."
- Dean Kamen
(Related: Fire, Inventions, Language)
"I've been looking at companies that are on a positive path vs. a negative path and I've come to use the language of sports, winning streaks and losing streaks."
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter
(Related: Sports, Negative, Positive, Winning, Language, Losing)
"The idea is that the object has a language unto itself."
- Anish Kapoor
(Related: Idea, Language)
"The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited."
- Alan Kay
(Related: Nature, Act, Computer, Language, Machine)
"One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer."
- Caroline Kennedy
(Related: Love, Mother, Brother, Energy, Gifts, Language, Libraries, Literature, Old, Open)
"French is the language that turns dirt into romance."
- Stephen King
(Related: Romance, Language)
"A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Related: Language, Riot)
"A riot is the language of the unheard."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Related: Language, Riot)
"I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language."
- Ben Kingsley
(Related: Cinema, Language, Silence, Theater)
"I think you can really tell a good actor if you can put a camera on them and they can just talk and emote and react and you don't have to keep cutting away from them, because they are the language and the behavior. It's all a tour-de-force performance."
- Sally Kirkland
(Related: Performance, Actor, Behavior, Language, Talk)
"Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared."
- Jeane Kirkpatrick
(Related: Religion)
"My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history."
- Lawrence R. Klein
(Related: Education, History, English, Mathematics, Public, School, Training)
"It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word."
- Kevin Kline
(Related: Language, Word)
"Sports is like rock 'n' roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions."
- Phil Knight
(Related: Sports, Emotions, Language)
"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language."
- Donald Knuth
(Related: Language, Name, Now, Programming, Succeed, Will)
"True creativity often starts where language ends."
- Arthur Koestler
(Related: Creativity, Language)
"Yes, we are all different. Different customs, different foods, different mannerisms, different languages, but not so different that we cannot get along with one another. If we will disagree without being disagreeable."
- J. Martin Kohe
(Related: Being, Will)
"In this respect I suppose I'm the total opposite of Garry. With his very emotive body language at the board he shows and displays all his emotions. I don't."
- Vladimir Kramnik
(Related: Body, Emotions, Language, Respect)
"For us chess players the language of artist is something natural."
- Vladimir Kramnik
(Related: Artist, Chess, Language)
"Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden."
- Karl Kraus
(Related: Mother, Thought, Language)
"He was one of those inexplicable gifts of nature, an artist who leaps over boundaries, changes our nervous systems, creates a new language, transmits new kinds of joy to our startled senses and spirits."
- Jack Kroll
(Related: Nature, Artist, Gifts, Inexplicable, Joy, Language, Senses, Spirits)
"I think I developed language skills to deal with threat. It's the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun."
- Barbara Kruger
(Related: Language)
"Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans."
- Barbara Kruger
(Related: Work, Attention, Language)
"What's great is that because math is such a universal language, really, our fans come in all shapes and sizes, all ages and genders and races and backgrounds and cultures."
- David Krumholtz
(Related: Fans, Language)
"It feels wonderful to be go back to the 1940s and recreate the whole era through my clothes, voice and body language. I am tired of playing the larger-than-life hero."
- Akshay Kumar
(Related: Body, Clothes, Language, Voice)
"Second, we also got a more authentic liturgy of the people of God, in the vernacular language."
- Hans Kung
(Related: God, People, Language)
"That means that every human being - without distinction of sex, age, race, skin color, language, religion, political view, or national or social origin - possesses an inalienable and untouchable dignity."
- Hans Kung
(Related: Age, Religion, Sex, Being, Dignity, Language, Race, Skin)
"My mom and my dad wanted my brother and I to have a better life, you know, better education, better jobs. It was probably harder, much, much harder, for my parents. When you're a kid, you can learn a language much more easily; I learned English in less than a year."
- Mila Kunis
(Related: Dad, Mom, Education, Life, Brother, English, Jobs, Language, Parents)
"I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it."
- Charles Kuralt
(Related: Love, Language, Plagiarism, Trying, Writer)
"To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children."
- Polykarp Kusch
(Related: Life, History, Challenge, Children, Economics, Language, Literature, Present, Study)
"An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write."
- William Labov
(Related: Home, African, American, Children, First, Language, Learning)
"I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities."
- William Labov
(Related: America, English, Language, Minority, Now, Research)
"In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth."
- Jacques Lacan
(Related: Deals, Existence, First, Language, Man, Words)
"There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language."
- Steve Lacy
(Related: People, Jazz, Language, Style)
"I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot."
- Karl Lagerfeld
(Related: English, School)
"Our approach was very simple. It was about creating a universal language. A show that will be attractive toward every people coming from all over the world. And that was a big thing."
- Guy Laliberte
(Related: People, Language, Will, World)
"A spirit, breathing the language of independence, is natural to Englishmen, few of whom are disposed to brook compulsion, or submit to the dictates of others, when not softened by reason, or tempered with kindness."
- Joseph Lancaster
(Related: Independence, Kindness, Language, Reason, Spirit)
"It was real Cheyenne. I would get the translations the night before, but it was very difficult because it was not like any other language you would be familiar with."
- Joe Lando
(Related: Language, Night)
"Language expresses people's thinking and it was by a Word that God created the world and preserves it."
- Walter Lang
(Related: God, People, Language, Thinking, Word, World)
"God has stated in clear and concise language how He created the universe and we ought not to doubt His Word."
- Walter Lang
(Related: God, Doubt, Language, Universe, Word)
"Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions."
- John Langdon
(Related: Design, Science, Language, Philosophy, Words)
"Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's difficult. But I discovered that it's easy because it's so brilliantly written. The words are perfect, and the language is intelligent and very emotional."
- Jessica Lange
(Related: Language, Shakespeare, Words)
"If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers."
- Doug Larson
(Related: English, Flowers, Language, Sense)
"Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language."
- Christopher Lasch
(Related: People, Language, Prejudice, Tradition)
"I start by using Chinese and many of the sounds of other languages are similar."
- Andy Lau
"Two races share today the soil of Canada. These people had not always been friends. But I hasten to say it. There is no longer any family here but the human family. It matters not the language people speak, or the altars at which they kneel."
- Wilfrid Laurier
(Related: Family, People, Canada, Friends, Language, Today)
"The Divinity could be invoked as well in the English language as in the French."
- Wilfrid Laurier
(Related: Divinity, English, Language)
"Languages are true analytical methods."
- Antoine Lavoisier
"I'm not called Jude Law, I have three names; I'm called 'Hunk Jude Law' or 'Heartthrob Jude Law'. In England anyway, that's my full name. That's the cheap language that's thrown around, that sums you up in one little bracket. It doesn't look at your life. But if one looks beyond, there is actually a little bit more."
- Jude Law
(Related: Life, England, Language, Law, Name, Names)
"Why on earth do we want closer connection with England? We have little in common with English people except our language. We are fast becoming an entirely different people."
- Henry Lawson
(Related: People, Connection, Earth, EnglEnglish, Language, Want)
"Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt."
- Emma Lazarus
(Related: Language, Nationality)
"I think somebody who speaks the language is going to notice immediately that I'm not Russian."
- Nicholas Lea
(Related: Language)
"Duty, then is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less."
- Robert E. Lee
(Related: Duty, Language, Word)
"Duty is the most sublime word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less."
- Robert E. Lee
(Related: Duty, Language, Word)
"I never found accents difficult, after learning languages."
- Vivien Leigh
(Related: Learning)
"I'm trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through."
- Sean Lennon
(Related: Crisis, Language, Today, Trying, World)
"A degree of lying - you know, white lies - seems to be inherent in all languages and all forms of communication."
- Matthew Lesko
(Related: Communication, Lies, Lying)
"Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing."
- Claude Levi-Strauss
(Related: Language, Logic, Man, Nothing, Reason)
"Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Art, Language)
"Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things."
- Flora Lewis
(Related: Language, Learning, Words)
"Restoring the Welsh language in Wales is nothing less than a revolution. It is only through revolutionary means that we can succeed."
- Saunders Lewis
(Related: Revolution, Language, Nothing, Succeed)
"My wife wanted my children to have some Chinese culture and education. She believes the children need to learn two languages and two cultures."
- Jet Li
(Related: Education, Wife, Children, Culture)
"English is my second language, but in Hong Kong, they don't know that I'm from China. They think I'm from Hollywood because all the films they see are from here. China and Hong Kong are very different places, but they're starting to merge. Still the culture is very different."
- Bai Ling
(Related: Culture, English, Hollywood, Language)
"My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule. There isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another."
- Art Linkletter
(Related: Religion, People, Help, Language, Philosophy)
"As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation."
- Franz Liszt
(Related: Mother, Children, Language)
"Once you embody the language, the character comes really naturally, especially when you put the costume on."
- Lucy Liu
(Related: Character, Language)
"People use location as a language in films, and Quentin uses action as a language in his films. There's really not a lot of violence. It's more of an emotional beat than it is a physical beat."
- Lucy Liu
(Related: People, Action, Language, Violence)
"In order to figure out how to make atoms compute, you have to learn how to speak their language and to understand how they process information under normal circumstances."
- Seth Lloyd
(Related: Atoms, Circumstances, Information, Language, Order)
"I know what the structure of the language is."
- Kurt Loder
(Related: Language)
"The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich."
- James Loeb
(Related: Time, Attention, Day, Enjoyment, Literature, Past, Schools, Teaching)
"Music is the universal language of mankind."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(Related: Music, Language, Mankind)
"Playing golf is like learning a foreign language."
- Henry Longhurst
(Related: Golf, Language, Learning)
"Its language is as bare as a monk's cell, and as uninviting."
- Clifford Longley
(Related: Language)
"They cannot make it say what they want it to say. And this is the beginning and the end of the case for retaining the old language: If the churches give it up, who will remember how to say what is said?"
- Clifford Longley
(Related: Beginning, Churches, End, Old, Want, Will)
"Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it."
- Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
(Related: Language)
"Americans are people who prefer the Continent to their own country, but refuse to learn its languages."
- Edward V. Lucas
(Related: People, Americans, Country)
"Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy."
- Bela Lugosi
(Related: Language, Speech)
"The language of America changed with the election of Bill Clinton, because with all due respect to my friends on the Republican side, Bill Clinton is the best communicator of the last 50 years. He felt your pain."
- Frank Luntz
(Related: America, Friends, Language, Pain, Republican, Respect, Years)
"Words can sometimes be used to confuse, but it's up to the practitioners of the study of language to apply them for good and not for evil. It is just like fire; fire can heat your house or burn it down."
- Frank Luntz
(Related: Evil, Fire, Language, Study, Words)
"There's a lot of money with a lot of big law firms that have a tremendous amount at stake by getting the right language to convince the right jury that my client is either innocent or that the opposition is guilty."
- Frank Luntz
(Related: Money, Jury, Language, Law, Opposition, Right)
"I have seen how effective language attached to policies that are mainstream and delivered by people who are passionate and effective can change the course of history."
- Frank Luntz
(Related: Change, History, People, Language)
"I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before."
- Frank Luntz
(Related: Politics, Strategy, Corporate, Language, World, Years)
"If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person."
- Frank Luntz
(Related: Language, Numbers)
"We can lie in the language of dress or try to tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent."
- Alison Lurie
(Related: Truth, Lie, Dress, Language)
"But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history."
- Thomas Lynch
(Related: History, Poetry, Hobbies, Language)
"If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done."
- Thomas Lynch
(Related: Language, Poems, Sense, Word)
"So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations."
- Thomas Lynch
(Related: Poetry, Effort, Language, Sense)
"I get along with all the women singers, but especially Dolly Parton. We talk the same hillbilly language."
- Loretta Lynn
(Related: Women, Language, Talk)
"On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance."
- Jean-Francois Lyotard
(Related: Society, Communication, Day, Importance, Language, Reality)
"The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power."
- Thomas B. Macaulay
(Related: Beauty, Power, Bible, English, Language)
"I had said no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him about his saucy language. It had never gotten to this level until I came back."
- Andrea Mackris
(Related: Language)
"One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Effect, Literary)
"Anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture - in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Music, Being, Books, Community, Culture, Help, Language, World)
"I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: People, Ideas, Games, Language, Relationships, Words, World)
"When the heart speaks, its language is the same under all latitudes."
- Ella Maillart
(Related: Heart, Language)
"I wanted to learn a few foreign languages, and therefore I had to go abroad."
- Ella Maillart
"I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought."
- Bernard Malamud
(Related: Love, Work, Flowers, Language)
"The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language."
- Paul de Man
(Related: Action, Language, Writer)
"Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means."
- Paul de Man
(Related: Language)
"I have been an actor now for 40 years having worked in over 10 countries and three languages."
- Nick Mancuso
(Related: Actor, Countries, Now, Years)
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."
- Nelson Mandela
(Related: Heart, Language, Man, Talk)
"Both of my parents are professors and everyone in my family has some fabulous degree of something or another and I couldn't get into college because I didn't know a language."
- Camryn Manheim
(Related: Family, College, Language, Parents)
"I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school."
- Camryn Manheim
(Related: College, Growing up, Language, Order, School, University)
"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates."
- Thomas Mann
(Related: Art, Judgment, Language, Names, Speech, Will)
"Do not ghettoize society by putting people into legal categories of gender, race, ethnicity, language, or other such characteristics."
- Preston Manning
(Related: Legal, Society, People, Gender, Language, Race)
"Senator, we just don't use that kind of language on the floor of the Senate."
- Mike Mansfield
(Related: Language, Senate)
"Well it is sometimes difficult to act in another language."
- Sophie Marceau
(Related: Act, Language)
"There is no doubt that this film is autobiographical, but at the same time it also tries to portray an ordinary couple in a language that everyone can understand."
- Sophie Marceau
(Related: Time, Doubt, Film, Language)
"Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French."
- Sophie Marceau
(Related: Acting, English, Language)
"Hope is the most important four-letter word in the language."
- Ed Markey
(Related: Hope, Language, Word)
"As you know, there are certain languages that lend themselves very easily to vocal use."
- Neville Marriner
"What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America."
- Branford Marsalis
(Related: America, Jazz, Language, Spirit)
"Parents should conduct their arguments in quiet, respectful tones, but in a foreign language. You'd be surprised what an inducement that is to the education of children."
- Judith Martin
(Related: Education, Arguments, Children, Language, Parents, Quiet)
"Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere."
- James Martineau
(Related: Music, Poetry, Religion, Language, Prayer)
"I don't feel restricted by the language: I feel more free."
- Olivier Martinez
"But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication."
- Abraham Maslow
(Related: Thoughts, Behavior, Being, Communication, Defense, Language, Motives)
"I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language."
- Harry Mathews
(Related: Dream, Being, Fantasy, France, Italy, Language)
"An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language."
- Henri Matisse
(Related: Nature, Artist, Language, Will)
"Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore."
- Yukihiro Matsumoto
(Related: Language, Theory)
"I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python."
- Yukihiro Matsumoto
(Related: Work, Language)
"From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer."
- Yukihiro Matsumoto
(Related: Power, Example)
"In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use."
- Yukihiro Matsumoto
(Related: Work, Class, Language)
"Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express."
- James C. Maxwell
(Related: Ideas, Language, Mathematicians, May)
"I think the main thing was that the character couldn't speak in regular language, so he had to be mimed."
- Peter Mayhew
(Related: Character, Language)
"Language is froth on the surface of thought."
- John McCarthy
(Related: Thought, Language)
"The difference between a contemporary liberal and a socialist is that to a liberal the most beautiful word in the English language is 'forbidden', whereas to a socialist the most beautiful word is 'compulsory'."
- John McCarthy
(Related: Difference, English, Language, Liberal, Word)
"95% on content and the computer language remains the same."
- Steve McConnell
(Related: Computer, Content, Language)
"Just learning to think in another language allows you to see your own culture in a better viewpoint."
- Gates McFadden
(Related: Culture, Language, Learning)
"Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity."
- John McGahern
(Related: English, Identity, Ireland, Irish, Language, Rain, Speech, Will)
"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."
- John McGahern
(Related: Language, Saying)
"Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language."
- Marshall McLuhan
(Related: Art, People, Language, Today)
"Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined."
- Cathy McMorris
(Related: Science, American, School, states, Students, Study, United)
"What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct."
- George H. Mead
(Related: Character, Language)
"When Toots finally could breathe again and the blood returned to his brain, he recalled that he had not passed or been passed by Jackie at any time in the race. Toots never used foul language but he came close that night. Jackie paid."
- Audrey Meadows
(Related: Time, Blood, Language, Night, Race)
"All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate. My language to each of them has to suit their brain."
- Sam Mendes
(Related: Language, Trying)
"Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only just the language of the Muslims, but it's also the language of the Hindus."
- Ismail Merchant
(Related: Language)
"Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem."
- James Merrill
(Related: Language, Words)
"But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice."
- James Merrill
(Related: Language, Voice)
"Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language."
- John Milius
(Related: Drama, Language, Learning, Skill, Writing)
"Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language."
- Slobodan Milosevic
(Related: History, Countries, Forget, Language, Literary, Living, Past, Tradition)
"Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here."
- Yao Ming
(Related: America, Basketball, Culture, Language, Learning, Will)
"I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me."
- Adrian Mitchell
(Related: Friends, Language, Literary, Want)
"If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction."
- Matthew Modine
(Related: Art, Science, Direction, Example, Fiction, Film, Gold, Language, Photography, Space)
"I feed on good soup, not beautiful language."
- Moliere
(Related: Language)
"We are all members of a single humanity, inside our hearts we all speak the same language, we all love our children and our parents, we all live in the same world."
- Marc Forne Molne
(Related: Love, Children, Humanity, Language, Parents, World)
"It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip."
- Eugenio Montale
(Related: Language, Prose)
"The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!"
- Maria Montessori
(Related: Men, Babyhood, Language)
"Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious."
- Alan Moore
(Related: Consciousness, First, Language)
"Should such an ignorant people lead the world? How did it come to this in the first place? 82 percent of us don't even have a passport! Just a handful can speak a language other than English."
- Michael Moore
(Related: People, English, First, Language, World)
"And, indeed, though they differ concerning other things, yet all agree in this: that they think there is one Supreme Being that made and governs the world, whom they call, in the language of their country, Mithras."
- Thomas More
(Related: Being, Country, Language, World)
"Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Love, Poetry, Authority, Fact, Language)
"Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, Attention, Language)
"The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, End, Language, Poets, Writing)
"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Fiction, Language)
"It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Experience, Language, Literary)
"I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Love, Discovery, Language)
"In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Home, Thought, Books, Language)
"Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare."
- Michael Moriarty
(Related: Honesty, Clarity, Language, Shakespeare, Tradition, Worth)
"Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it."
- Christopher Morley
(Related: Life, Men, Language)
"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
- Toni Morrison
(Related: Life, Language, May, Meaning, Measure)
"I thought it was respectful to each country to sing in their language."
- Nana Mouskouri
(Related: Thought, Country, Language)
"I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language."
- Paul Muldoon
(Related: Language, Repetition)
"No one's going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude."
- Rupert Murdoch
(Related: Travel, Attitude, English, Language)
"Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries."
- Gilbert Murray
(Related: Grammar, Language, Unconscious)
"Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish."
- Mike Myers
(Related: People, Language, Talk)
"I was worried people would laugh at me when I started to talk the language, but they were just pleasantly surprised that I could. The sense of humour here is great - once I could have a giggle, I settled down."
- Parminder Nagra
(Related: People, Language, Sense, Talk)
"Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think."
- Holly Near
(Related: Food, Dance, Expression, Language, Songs)
"The presentation of hard core pornography, brutality and shocking language, from what I hear, is leaving the public jaded and tired of this kind of film."
- Pola Negri
(Related: Film, Jaded, Language, Pornography, Public)
"Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around."
- Howard Nemerov
(Related: Extreme, Language, Logic, Mathematics, Remarkable, Talk)
"Language cares."
- Howard Nemerov
(Related: Language)
"I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon."
- Larry Niven
(Related: Medical, Future, Language, Moon, Talk, Visit, Want)
"Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone."
- Albert J. Nock
(Related: Life, History, Knowledge, Mathematics, Will)
"In terms of language, yeah we get bleeped and blurred and things, but in terms of content, I would probably say we're getting away with more here than we could get away with in Britain. And that surprised us so much!"
- Graham Norton
(Related: Content, Language)
"After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967."
- Paul Nurse
"We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language."
- Joyce Carol Oates
(Related: Blood, Language, Memory)
"Apparently Arnold was inspired by President Bush, who proved you can be a successful politician in this country even if English is your second language."
- Conan O'Brien
(Related: Successful, Country, English, Language, President)
"I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular."
- David Ogilvy
(Related: People, Day, Grammar, Language, Rules, Trying)
"I used some vivid language that, if I could take it back, I'd take it back. It's not my intention to be personally critical of the President or of anyone else."
- Paul O'Neill
(Related: Intention, Language, President)
"Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that piece of music."
- Leo Ornstein
(Related: Music, Language, Today, Value)
"Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language."
- Leo Ornstein
(Related: Aesthetics, Language, Today, Trying)
"The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get."
- Leo Ornstein
(Related: Experience, Danger, Grave, Language)
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
- George Orwell
(Related: Appearance, Language, Lies, Murder, Sound, Wind)
"Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."
- George Orwell
(Related: Chaos, End, Improvement, Language)
"Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers."
- George Orwell
(Related: Creation, Language, Poets, Workers)
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
- George Orwell
(Related: Enemy, Insincerity, Language, Words)
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
- George Orwell
(Related: Thought, Language)
"There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language."
- William Osler
(Related: Art, Men, Language, Observation)
"I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical."
- Joel Osteen
(Related: God, Bible, Language, Principles)
"England is very interested as well, and other countries if I could speak the languages!"
- Miranda Otto
(Related: Countries, England)
"Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!"
- Wilfred Owen
(Related: Language, Rest, Sense)
"Assange is not a 'journalist' any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine 'Inspire' is a 'journalist.' He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands."
- Sarah Palin
(Related: Blood, English)
"I've had a very interesting career. I get to do amazing things and work with amazing people and travel and learn languages - things most people don't get the opportunity to do."
- Gwyneth Paltrow
(Related: Travel, Work, People, Opportunity, Career)
"Body language is essential for an actress, even if you don't use your body in an athletic way. Just to be free, to use it like your voice. A body can be small and have incredible violence. A body talks."
- Anne Parillaud
(Related: Body, Language, Violence, Voice)
"Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language."
- Evan Parker
(Related: Music, People, Attitude, Language, Sharing)
"A gloss is a total system of perception and language."
- Talcott Parsons
(Related: Perception, Language)
"Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history."
- Octavio Paz
(Related: History, Nature, Expression, Feeling, Language, Literature, Sense, Silence)
"It doesn't happen very often that you get to work with some really good friends of yours and there's a common language between everyone, you don't have to explain what you're doing, you can just run with it. It makes it just so much easier and more relaxed."
- Elizabeth Perkins
(Related: Work, Friends, Language)
"Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's."
- Martin Lewis Perl
(Related: Mathematics, Parents)
"Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress."
- Alan Perlis
(Related: Change, Progress, Programming)
"A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant."
- Alan Perlis
(Related: Attention, Language, Programming)
"In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages."
- Alan Perlis
(Related: English, Programming, Word)
"Pauley Perrette: I was a criminal science fanatic and went to study it in college as well and I think that helped me on NCIS because I was comfortable with the language, I had studied criminal science in school for years."
- Pauley Perrette
(Related: Science, College, Language, School, Study, Years)
"The Bible was written in several languages, embraces many literary forms, and reflects cultures very different from our own. These are important considerations for properly understanding the Bible in its context."
- Troy Perry
(Related: Bible, Literary, Understanding)
"God speaks to me not through the thunder and the earthquake, nor through the ocean and the stars, but through the Son of Man, and speaks in a language adapted to my imperfect sight and hearing."
- William Lyon Phelps
(Related: God, Son, Hearing, Language, Man, Ocean, Sight, Stars)
"To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing."
- Edith Piaf
(Related: People, Successful, France, Language, Nothing)
"If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning."
- Kenneth L. Pike
(Related: Behavior, Language, Meaning)
"Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation."
- Kenneth L. Pike
(Related: Language)
"We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?"
- Kenneth L. Pike
(Related: Language)
"Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language."
- Kenneth L. Pike
(Related: Nature, Truth, Language)
"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective."
- Kenneth L. Pike
(Related: Behavior, Language, Perspective, Rules, Universe)
"A young man who is here speaks the Panis language, and in many other respects, is preferable."
- Zebulon Pike
(Related: Language, Man)
"I'm absolutely convinced of that. Israel is the representative of the United States in that part of the world. Its policies are so integrated with American policies that they use the same language."
- John Pilger
(Related: American, Israel, Language, states, United, World)
"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language."
- Steven Pinker
(Related: Art, Music, Poetry, Language, Literature, Mind, Painting, Sculpture)
"Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate."
- Steven Pinker
(Related: Children, Environment, Fact, Kids, Language, Parents)
"They place great stress on the clarity of our language for expressing nuances and showing subtleties."
- Bernard Pivot
(Related: Clarity, Language, Stress)
"There is a pride in speaking this language."
- Bernard Pivot
(Related: Language, Pride)
"French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic."
- Bernard Pivot
(Related: Language)
"People who do not speak our language very well do complain of feeling rebuffed by French people, who can sometimes be impatient, or even intolerant."
- Bernard Pivot
(Related: People, Feeling, Language)
"You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules."
- Bernard Pivot
(Related: Feeling, Guests, Language, Rules, World)
"The more English is heard in the world, the more gratifying it seems to speak French, and above all to know the culture of our country. They find a kind of French social grace in the language and culture."
- Bernard Pivot
(Related: Country, Culture, English, Grace, Language, World)
"Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science."
- John Charles Polanyi
(Related: Science, Values, Language, Pursuit)
"Of course language manifests a belief only if we use its words with the implied acceptance of their appositeness."
- Michael Polanyi
(Related: Belief, Acceptance, Language, Words)
"So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language."
- Michael Polanyi
(Related: Language, Questions, Theory, Universe, Vocabulary, Will)
"Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin."
- Marcus V. Pollio
(Related: Science, Harmony, Language, Words)
"Newt Gingrich's job to capture the Congress was to give Republican candidates an edge and a distinction from their Democratic opponent. That required a very high profile, some very strong language."
- Pete du Pont
(Related: Congress, Job, Language, Republican)
"Metaphor is embodied in language."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Language, Metaphor)
"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Language, Literature, Meaning)
"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Language, Writers)
"The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail."
- John Wesley Powell
(Related: Art, Language, Speech, Wonders)
"I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is."
- Terry Prachett
(Related: Language, Trying, Universe)
"Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood."
- Jack Prelutsky
(Related: Imagination, Opportunity, Ideas, Childhood, Language, Play, Problems, Writing)
"I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read."
- Jack Prelutsky
(Related: Poetry, English, Language)
"It's always better to speak the language of the team. Not only for the direct contact with everyone - sometimes it also helps you to understand the mentality of the people in the team a bit better."
- Alain Prost
(Related: People, Language)
"The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!"
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Language)
"Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels."
- Willard Van Orman Quine
(Related: Change, Myth, Semantics, Words)
"Language is a social art."
- Willard Van Orman Quine
(Related: Art, Language)
"Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption."
- Willard Van Orman Quine
(Related: Science, Language, Sin)
"Music is a language, you see, a universal language."
- Sun Ra
(Related: Music, Language)
"Even in India the Hindi film industry might be the best known but there are movies made in other regional languages in India, be it Tamil or Bengali. Those experiences too are different from the ones in Bombay."
- Aishwarya Rai
(Related: Movies, Film)
"The process of filmmaking is very musical, you get into the rhythm and the rhythmics of how someone is, especially with Woody Allen who is very much into body language and body movement."
- Charlotte Rampling
(Related: Body, Language)
"Swearing is industry language. For as long as we're alive it's not going to change. You've got to be boisterous to get results."
- Gordon Ramsay
(Related: Change, Language, Results, Swearing)
"There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Language, Pain, Painting, Struggle)
"Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don't understand the language that you're singing in, they still know good music when they hear it."
- Lou Rawls
(Related: Music, People, Communication, Language, Singing, World)
"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
- Sam Rayburn
(Related: Language)
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
- Ronald Reagan
(Related: Government, English, Help, Language, Words)
"The language of the moment or, as it were, the language of the order in which we live, is the image. I felt that if I wanted to commune with the public, I should best do so through the language of image. It's a conscious embrace of a contradiction."
- Godfrey Reggio
(Related: Contradiction, Language, Order, Public)
"So, not for lack of love of language, but because I feel our language is in an enormous state of humiliation, I decided to make films without words."
- Godfrey Reggio
(Related: Love, Language, State, Words)
"But when, in the first setting out, he takes it for granted without proof, that distinctions found in the structure of all languages, have no foundation in nature; this surely is too fastidious a way of treating the common sense of mankind."
- Thomas Reid
(Related: Nature, Common sense, First, Mankind, Proof)
"A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy."
- Thomas Reid
(Related: Doubt, Error, May, Philosophy)
"We need only look to our Navajo Code Talkers during World War II to see the value that Native languages bring not only to their culture, but to the security of all Americans."
- Rick Renzi
(Related: War, Americans, Culture, Security, Value, World, World war)
"I have a high regard for Native languages and the pivotal role they have played in our nation's history."
- Rick Renzi
(Related: History, Nation)
"Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work."
- Joshua Reynolds
(Related: Work, Conviction, End, Language, Words)
"I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek."
- Anne Rice
(Related: Beginning, Study)
"We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative."
- Adrienne Rich
(Related: Vision, Feeling, Language, May, Old, Running, Thinking)
"Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe."
- Adrienne Rich
(Related: Poetry, Power, Language, Universe)
"When a language creates as it does a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past."
- Christopher Ricks
(Related: Community, Courtesy, Language, Past, Present)
"Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner."
- Paul Ricoeur
(Related: Expression, Language, Meaning)
"At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: People, Advice, Language, Mail)
"I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Control, Difficulty, Fate, Language, Open)
"Regardless of whether you speak the language or are familiar with a culture, the picture should hold up."
- Herb Ritts
(Related: Culture, Language)
"He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and smelly fish."
- Jose Rizal
(Related: Love, Fish, Language)
"While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty."
- Jose Rizal
(Related: People, Language, Liberty)
"The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that."
- Richard Rorty
(Related: Beliefs, Cause, Language, World)
"I would guess that the decision to create a small special purpose language or use an existing general purpose language is one of the toughest decisions that anyone facing the need for a new language must make."
- Guido van Rossum
(Related: Decision, Purpose, Decisions, Language)
"If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls."
- Guido van Rossum
(Related: Design, Language)
"If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset."
- Guido van Rossum
(Related: Funny, Language, Talking)
"In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages."
- Guido van Rossum
(Related: Work, Example, Focus, Programming)
"Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either."
- Guido van Rossum
(Related: Time, Work, Belief, Now, Programming, Students)
"We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence."
- Joseph Roux
(Related: Peace, Father, Wife, Friend, Language, Losing, Man, Name, Unhappiness)
"Well, visual language is another boring discussion about the nature of film."
- Alan Rudolph
(Related: Nature, Film, Language)
"Ever since I was a kid, I just loved those comedians on TV who would just have fun with the language."
- Alan Rudolph
(Related: Comedians, Fun, Language)
"As the president of Kosovo, I am more concerned about the current situation with the employment standing at around 70 % of the population, which is young, with great potential, speaking many foreign languages and having wide expertise."
- Ibrahim Rugova
(Related: Expertise, Population, Potential, President)
"Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering."
- Jane Rule
(Related: Morality, Language, Order)
"I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Progress, Thoughts, Addiction, Language, Obstacles, Philosophy)
"We breathed the air of freedom without knowing the language or any person."
- Nelly Sachs
(Related: Freedom, Language)
"The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in."
- George Saintsbury
(Related: Life, Work, Artist, Giving, Language, Manners, State)
"One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name."
- George Saintsbury
(Related: History, Absence, Facts, Fiction, Literary, Literature, Name, Prose)
"Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on."
- Harrison Salisbury
(Related: Economics, Journalism, Language, Liberal, Literature, Students)
"Go learn the language. Go take some acting lessons. Start from zero like everybody else."
- Roselyn Sanchez
(Related: Acting, Language)
"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: Work, Language, Slang)
"The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: People, Language, Respect, Sea, Slang)
"Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator."
- George Santayana
(Related: Money, Values, Language, May)
"It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Communication, Illusion, Language, Problems, Reality, Reflection)
"No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Reality)
"No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Language, World)
"National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry."
- Edward Sapir
"It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Heart, Language, Meaning)
"It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Language, Learning, Study, Teaching)
"A common creation demands a common sacrifice, and perhaps not the least potent argument in favour of a constructed international language is the fact that it is equally foreign, or apparently so, to the traditions of all nationalities."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Sacrifice, Argument, Creation, Fact, Language, Traditions)
"A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Language)
"As a matter of fact, a national language which spreads beyond its own confines very quickly loses much of its original richness of content and is in no better case than a constructed language."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Content, Fact, Language, Richness)
"Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Time, Language, Religious, Spirit)
"English, once accepted as an international language, is no more secure than French has proved to be as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy or as Latin has proved to be as the international language of science."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Science, Diplomacy, English, Language)
"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Society, Expression, Language, Mercy, World)
"In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Expression, Language, Sense)
"The supposed inferiority of a constructed language to a national one on the score of richness of connotation is, of course, no criticism of the idea of a constructed language."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Inferiority, Idea, Criticism, Language, Richness)
"These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: English, Simplicity)
"The spirit of logical analysis should in practice blend with the practical pressure for the adoption of some form of international language, but it should not allow itself to be stampeded by it."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Adoption, Language, Practice, Pressure, Spirit)
"The psychology of a language which, in one way or another, is imposed upon one because of factors beyond one's control, is very different from the psychology of a language which one accepts of one's free will."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Control, Free will, Language, Psychology)
"The attitude of independence toward a constructed language which all national speakers must adopt is really a great advantage, because it tends to make man see himself as the master of language instead of its obedient servant."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Attitude, Independence, Language, Man)
"So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Language, Spirit, Vocabulary)
"We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."
- Edward Sapir
(Related: Experience, Choices, Community, Habits, Language)
"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is."
- Jose Saramago
(Related: Language, Needs, Writers)
"Image is an international language."
- Marjane Satrapi
(Related: Language)
"In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Grammar, Language, Spirit, Study)
"Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Language, Laws, Will)
"The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Language)
"The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: First, Grammar, Language)
"The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: History, Business, Study, Will)
"Whitney wanted to eradicate the idea that in the case of a language we are dealing with a natural faculty; in fact, social institutions stand opposed to natural institutions."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Idea, Fact, Language)
"A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Language)
"In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Fact, Wonder)
"Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Grammar, Language)
"Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Truth, Idea, Language)
"Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Psychology, Will)
"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."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Time, Language)
"Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage."
- Marilyn vos Savant
(Related: English, Language, Rules)
"All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline."
- Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin
"The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine."
- Dorothy L. Sayers
(Related: English, Language, Machine, Simplicity)
"I came up with new leads for game stories by being observant and clever, by using the many gifts of the English language to intrigue and hook a reader."
- Dick Schaap
(Related: Being, English, Gifts, Language)
"I was also in love with the English language."
- Dick Schaap
(Related: Love, English, Language)
"Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting."
- Francis Schaeffer
(Related: Thought, Church, Language, Responsibility)
"People who share the same language, French or Chinese or whatever, have the same vocal cords and emit sounds which are basically the same, as they come from the same throats and lungs."
- Pierre Schaeffer
(Related: People, Language)
"That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened - it's just been intensified."
- Robert Scheer
(Related: Thought, People, Language, Will)
"In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible."
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
(Related: Art, Religion, Education, Bible, Language, Liberal, Mythology, Words, World)
"The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages."
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
(Related: Being, Sense, Words)
"First you learn a new language, profanity; and second you learn not to discipline your dogs when you're mad, and that's most of the time when you're training dogs."
- Lou Schultz
(Related: Time, Discipline, Dogs, First, Language, Profanity, Training)
"I thought that subtitles are boring because they're there generally to serve us with information to make you understand what people are saying in a different language."
- Tony Scott
(Related: Thought, People, Information, Language, Saying)
"Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life."
- Charles Scribner, Jr.
(Related: Life, Soul, Intellect, Language, Reading)
"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."
- W. G. Sebald
(Related: Trust, First, Language, Problems)
"I grew up speaking both languages, and for me that's really important."
- Jon Secada
"I grew up in a community that was bilingual. I've done it for a while, singing in both languages."
- Jon Secada
(Related: Community, Singing)
"The form language used by the ancient Egyptians in their structures is minimal."
- Harry Seidler
(Related: Language)
"There was no language barrier when it came to kids, and when it came to play."
- Connie Sellecca
(Related: Kids, Language, Play)
"The payment made by a manufacturer to a patentee for the privilege of using the patent process, is usually termed, in commercial language, a rent; and under the same head must be ranked all extraordinary qualities of body and mind."
- Nassau William Senior
(Related: Body, Language, Mind, Privilege)
"A masculine education cannot spare from professional study and the necessary acquisition of languages, the time and attention which I have bestowed on the compositions of my countrymen."
- Anne Seward
(Related: Education, Time, Attention, Study)
"Words may be false and full of art; Sighs are the natural language of the heart."
- Thomas Shadwell
(Related: Art, Heart, Language, May, Words)
"We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture."
- Moshe Sharett
(Related: People, Virtue, Country, Culture, Land, Language)
"Arabs respect only the language of force."
- Moshe Sharett
(Related: Force, Language, Respect)
"The promise of America is one immigration policy for all who seek to enter our shores, whether they come from Mexico, Haiti or Canada, there must be one set of rules for everybody. We cannot welcome those to come and then try and act as though any culture will not be respected or treated inferior. We cannot look at the Latino community and preach "one language." No one gave them an English test before they sent them to Iraq to fight for America."
- Al Sharpton
(Related: Policy, Act, America, Canada, Community, Culture, English, Fight, Iraq, Language, Promise, Rules, Will)
"England and America are two countries separated by the same language."
- George Bernard Shaw
(Related: America, Countries, England, Language)
"Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language."
- Carol Shields
(Related: Life, Language, Words)
"In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language."
- Hu Shih
(Related: Language, Question, Students, University)
"After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country."
- Hu Shih
(Related: People, Country, Culture, Intellectuals, Language, Learning)
"On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people."
- Hu Shih
(Related: Poetry, People, America, Friends, July, Language, Now, Poems, Tongue, Writing)
"The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - that is confrontational. That's just a part of the language of jazz - at a certain point."
- Matthew Shipp
(Related: Jazz, Language, Punk)
"I have set out to change the language of the international system."
- Clare Short
(Related: Change, Language)
"It made me think about a whole area of human activity that was not really a concern to me before that, because I was involved in reading Chinese history, or languages, or whatever."
- Ron Silver
(Related: History, Concern, Reading)
"You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do."
- Ron Silver
(Related: People, Body, Intentions, Language)
"The problem and privilege we all have is being alive in this century and able to read this language. It makes any list meaningless except the list of an illiterate."
- John Sladek
(Related: Being, Language, Privilege)
"Everybody laughs the same in every language because laughter is a universal connection."
- Yakov Smirnoff
(Related: Connection, Language, Laughter)
"I believe that laughter is a language of God and that we can all live happily ever laughter."
- Yakov Smirnoff
(Related: God, Language, Laughter)
"Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet."
- Huston Smith
(Related: Business, Poetry, Truth, Language, Tradition)
"I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing."
- Ian Smith
(Related: Civilization, Hospitals, Language, Schools)
"Language changes very fast."
- John M. Smith
(Related: Language)
"You couldn't have human society without language."
- John M. Smith
(Related: Society, Language)
"Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting."
- Patti Smith
(Related: Time, Language, Writing)
"We may come to Jesus and ask Him; He will know all about it; if He comes to a little child, he will adapt himself to the language and capacity of a little child."
- Joseph Smith, Jr.
(Related: Language, May, Will)
"Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence."
- Robert Smithson
(Related: Language)
"Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head."
- Robert Smithson
(Related: Idea, End, Language, World)
"Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification."
- Robert Smithson
(Related: Language)
"Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising."
- Robert Smithson
(Related: Advertising, Language)
"Love can be understood only "from the inside," as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it."
- Robert C. Solomon
(Related: Love, Language, World)
"Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(Related: Travel, People, Countries, Memory)
"You know, when it was done originally, they always had to fight to keep it going at the end of each season. Now, The Odd Couple has become part of our language and culture."
- Brett Somers
(Related: Culture, End, Fight, Language, Now)
"Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it."
- Stephen Sondheim
(Related: Language, Poets, Poor, Writers)
"Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies."
- Peter Sotos
(Related: Language)
"If I have to do something, I feel I should do it perfectly, and ofcourse, Hindi language is a problem."
- Soundarya
(Related: Language)
"And I believe that public broadcasting has an important trust with the American people, it's an intimate medium of television, and that we can do reading and language development for young children without getting into human sexuality."
- Margaret Spellings
(Related: Trust, People, Development, American, Children, Language, Public, Reading, Sexuality, Television)
"I grew up in France, my first language was French, and I tend to gravitate towards French cooking."
- Robert Stack
(Related: Cooking, First, France, Language)
"Speech happens to not be his language."
- Madame de Stael
(Related: Language, Speech)
"The best way in the world to deceive believers is to cloak a message in religious language and declare that it conveys some new insight from God."
- Charles Stanley
(Related: God, Language, Religious, World)
"I have a good ear for languages."
- Harry Dean Stanton
"I said in sharp language that that practice was wrong."
- Ken Starr
(Related: Language, Practice, Wrong)
"There's a lot of things that go on when you're on tour that cannot be controlled. I'm not even talking about myself, but of course there's sexual activity and drugs, fighting and language; it is certainly not a place to raise a family."
- Peter Steele
(Related: Family, Drugs, Fighting, Language, Talking)
"Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence."
- George Steiner
(Related: Language, Reality, Rest, Silence)
"All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature."
- Rudolf Steiner
(Related: Nature, Soul, Language, Now, Secrets, Whisper)
"I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Hope, Emotions, Language, Play, Poems)
"I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Art, Life, Poetry, Language, Meaning, Quiet, Word)
"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
(Related: Language, Speech)
"A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his native language from thousands upon thousands of his fellow citizens."
- George Stigler
(Related: Work, People, Language, Opinions)
"I see music as one language. If one musical form eats its own tail, it dies. So it needs to be a mongrel, it needs to be hybridised."
- Sting
(Related: Music, Language, Needs)
"I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language."
- Karlheinz Stockhausen
(Related: Language)
"While I admire the insights of many of the people in the world of computing, I get this cold feeling that I speak a different language."
- Clifford Stoll
(Related: People, Feeling, Language, World)
"With the requests of some he complied, and has published a discourse, delivered before the Society for recovering drowned persons, which may be justly pronounced one of the most beautiful and interesting sermons in the English language."
- John Strachan
(Related: Society, English, Language, May, Sermons)
"When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Time, Civilization, Existence, Language, Nation)
"The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Genius, Clarity, Direction, Language, Restraint, Simplicity, Unity)
"The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language."
- J. Michael Straczynski
(Related: Quality, Thoughts, Language)
"Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler."
- Mark Strand
(Related: Poetry, First, Language, Rest)
"I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes."
- Mark Strand
(Related: Poetry, Language, Limits, Tradition)
"Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic."
- Peter Frederick Strawson
(Related: Expression, Language, Logic, Rules)
"This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today."
- Bjarne Stroustrup
(Related: Being, Compromise, Effort, Evolution, Language, May, Today, Will)
"People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language."
- Bjarne Stroustrup
(Related: People, Language, Programming, Want, World)
"I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining."
- Bjarne Stroustrup
(Related: Programming, Support)
"However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious."
- Bjarne Stroustrup
(Related: Flaws, Language, Limitations, Programming)
"Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language."
- William Strunk, Jr.
(Related: Language)
"We believe the Senate language provides for federal subsidies for abortions. Plus there's a language in there where you have to pay one dollar per month, every enrollee, to pay for a fund for reproductive rights which include abortion. And that's totally against federal law. So we are saying take that out."
- Bart Stupak
(Related: Abortion, Rights, Language, Law, Saying, Senate)
"We are not voting for health care if we do not resolve this language on public funding for abortion - no public funding for abortion."
- Bart Stupak
(Related: Health, Abortion, Care, Language, Public, Voting)
"All I'm asking for is the law that's been on the books for the last 33 years, no public funding for abortion. We are both saying the same thing, pro-life, pro-choice. Let's find the language that works for both of us so we can pass health care."
- Bart Stupak
(Related: Health, Abortion, Books, Care, Language, Law, Public, Saying, Years)
"I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating."
- Andy Summers
(Related: Language, Play)
"When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it."
- Billy Sunday
(Related: English, Language)
"It's important to me to work in my own language now and then. I love English, but you can never learn to master a foreign language if you're not brought up with it."
- Max von Sydow
(Related: Love, Work, English, Language, Now)
"The idea of working with Steven Spielberg was very attractive. He's such a master. He knows the language of the camera and of filmmaking, which gives him a great freedom."
- Max von Sydow
(Related: Idea, Freedom, Language)
"I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor."
- Max von Sydow
(Related: Mother, Actor, English, Language, Tongue)
"There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting."
- John Millington Synge
(Related: Irish, Language)
"Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms."
- John Millington Synge
(Related: Men)
"We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has."
- Deborah Tannen
(Related: Power, Language)
"For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships."
- Deborah Tannen
(Related: Women, Conversation, Language, Relationships)
"You may imagine the joy manifested by these poor Africans, when they heard one of their own color address them in a friendly manner, and in a language they could comprehend!"
- Lewis Tappan
(Related: Joy, Language, May, Poor)
"I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next."
- Quentin Tarantino
(Related: Language, Want)
"The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Friend, First, Language)
"Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit."
- Jeremy Taylor
(Related: Soul, Language, Meditation, Spirit, Tongue)
"I want a language that speaks the truth."
- Studs Terkel
(Related: Truth, Language, Want)
"Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
- Lewis Thomas
(Related: Language)
"You know, they were returning to the language of the people and trying to use musical language, particularly as Copland did to create a musical language in which all Americans would feel that they had a stake."
- Michael Tilson Thomas
(Related: People, Americans, Language, Trying)
"I think it is an inborn talent - just luck. Some people can learn languages; some can throw a ball. Most people have something. My talent is drawing and painting."
- Mike Thompson
(Related: Talent, People, Luck, Painting)
"Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Change, Time, Evolution, Language, Years)
"The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Excitement, Language)
"The language of friendship is not words but meanings."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Friendship, Language, Words)
"My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language."
- James Thurber
(Related: Answers, English, Expression, Fact, Grace, Language, Lies, Opposition, Value)
"Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone."
- Paul Tillich
(Related: Being, Glory, Language, Pain, Word)
"Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone."
- Paul Tillich
(Related: Being, Glory, Language, Loneliness, Pain, Solitude, Word)
"Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate."
- Paul Tillich
(Related: Concern, Language, Man)
"I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."
- J. R. R. Tolkien
(Related: Life, Time, Thought)
"It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain."
- Lily Tomlin
(Related: Belief, Deep, Language)
"Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain."
- Lily Tomlin
(Related: Deep, Language, Man)
"I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain."
- Lily Tomlin
(Related: Deep, Language)
""Let God be true but every man a liar" is the language of true faith."
- Aiden Wilson Tozer
(Related: Faith, God, Language, Man)
"The Republic of Macedonia is being built on democratic ideals and values, not on ethnic groups. Those ideals and values include economic opportunities, language and educational opportunities, religious rights, and political processes."
- Boris Trajkovski
(Related: Values, Being, Rights, Ideals, Language, Religious)
"In both business and personal life, I've always found that travel inspires me more than anything else I do. Evidence of the languages, cultures, scenery, food, and design sensibilities that I discover all over the world can be found in every piece of my jewelry."
- Ivanka Trump
(Related: Business, Design, Travel, Food, Life, World)
"My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature's laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided."
- Edward Tufte
(Related: Nature, Idea, Culture, Gender, Information, Language, Laws, Principles)
"In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!"
- Ivan Turgenev
(Related: Comfort, Country, Doubt, Fate, Support)
"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Blind, Kindness, Language)
"More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor."
- John W. Vessey, Jr.
(Related: English, Language, Understanding)
"The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things."
- Giambattista Vico
(Related: Ideas, Mind, Order, Spirit, Words)
"The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."
- Gore Vidal
(Related: Words)
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
- Gore Vidal
(Related: Time, People, Disguise, Language, Vote, Will, Words)
"It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language."
- A. E. van Vogt
(Related: English, Language)
"Tears are the silent language of grief."
- Voltaire
(Related: Grief, Language, Tears)
"I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain."
- Jane Wagner
(Related: Deep, Language)
"The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs."
- Arthur E. Waite
(Related: Language)
"Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past."
- Andrzej Wajda
(Related: Language, Literature, Past, Want)
"Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema."
- Andrzej Wajda
(Related: American, Cinema, English, Entertainment, France, Italy, Language, World)
"When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it."
- Andrzej Wajda
(Related: Perception, Film, Language, Understanding, Words, World)
"I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: Poetry, History, Language, Now, Old, Years)
"I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: Beauty, Women, Sex, Ideas, Attitude, Language, Poets, Race)
"Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: Poetry, Language)
"Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: Love, Irish, Language, Today)
"I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: Poetry, American, English, Language)
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
- Derek Walcott
(Related: English, Language, Property)
"The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way."
- Jimmy Wales
(Related: People, Goal, Beer, Free speech, Language, World)
"Real programmers can write assembly code in any language."
- Larry Wall
(Related: Language)
"Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive."
- Larry Wall
(Related: Work, Language)
"If the president is going to use so much language of theology and the Bible, then let's use that language for a serious discussion about the war in Iraq. And that was never done."
- Jim Wallis
(Related: War, Bible, Iraq, Language, President, Theology)
"There are realities we all share, regardless of our nationality, language, or individual tastes. As we need food, so do we need emotional nourishment: love, kindness, appreciation, and support from others."
- J. Donald Walters
(Related: Food, Love, Appreciation, Kindness, Language, Nationality, Support)
"A warm smile is the universal language of kindness."
- William Arthur Ward
(Related: Kindness, Language, Smile)
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- Booker T. Washington
(Related: English, Unconscious, Vocabulary, Words)
"If you can not master your language you must be it's slave."
- Jenny Weber
(Related: Language)
"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Language, Mind, Prison)
"The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions."
- James Welch
(Related: College, Community, Language, Now, Traditions)
"Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana."
- James Welch
(Related: Imagination, Desire, Language, Montana, Writer)
"I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative."
- Irvine Welsh
(Related: Music, Excitement, Language)
"On the contrary a film can promote the idea of change without any political message whatsoever but in its form and language can tell people that they can change their lives and contribute to progressive changes in the world."
- Wim Wenders
(Related: Change, People, Idea, Film, Language, World)
"It was pretty awful for us children because we never really knew the local children. Mother was keen for us to learn languages, so our travels took us to France and Italy, as well as the West Country."
- Mary Wesley
(Related: Mother, Children, Country, France, Italy, Pretty)
"I speak two languages, Body and English."
- Mae West
(Related: Body, English)
"Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!"
- Morris West
(Related: God, Words)
"Numbers constitute the only universal language."
- Nathanael West
(Related: Language, Numbers)
"Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language."
- Timothy West
(Related: Language)
"I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there."
- Paul Westerberg
(Related: Time, Language)
"I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off."
- Donald E. Westlake
(Related: Actors, Choice, Feeling, Language, Old, Sense, Words)
"Make it, not make it? What's the difference? Music is a language, it's a dance of life, and it can be a part of your life without being something that earns."
- Tina Weymouth
(Related: Life, Music, Dance, Being, Difference, Language)
"The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution."
- Byron White
(Related: Design, Constitution, Court, Deals, Language, Law)
"Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language."
- Alfred North Whitehead
(Related: Life, Language)
"Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language."
- Alfred North Whitehead
(Related: Nature, Human nature, Language, Speech)
"We've already recognized that it is absolutely essential for British children to learn other languages and we will be working hard to put further strategies in place to ensure this."
- John Whitehead
(Related: Children, Will)
"Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all."
- Walt Whitman
(Related: Time, Growth, English, Language, Race)
"Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages."
- Benjamin Whorf
(Related: Words)
"Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it."
- Benjamin Whorf
(Related: Experience, Language)
"At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms."
- Benjamin Whorf
(Related: Time, Language, Space, Universe)
"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language."
- Benjamin Whorf
(Related: Nature, Language)
"The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression."
- Eugene Wigner
(Related: Expression, Language, Laws)
"The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way."
- Thornton Wilder
(Related: Winning, Exploration, Future, Language, Manipulation, Will)
"It's like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with."
- William Wiley
(Related: English, Possibilities)
"As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise."
- George Will
(Related: Advertising, Language, Nation)
"In order to be a diplomat, one must speak a number of languages, including doubletalk."
- Carey Williams
(Related: Order)
"When I'm on TV, I'm often talking to a conservative host. I may have another conservative arguing with me. You've got very limited time, and you're using 'sound-bite' type language."
- Juan Williams
(Related: Time, Conservative, Language, May, Talking)
"We have a president for whom English is a second language. He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators,' but he's pretty much one himself."
- Robin Williams
(Related: Dictators, English, Language, President, Pretty)
"What language are you talking in now? It appears to be bollocks."
- Richard Wilson
(Related: Language, Now, Talking)
"Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening."
- Jeanette Winterson
(Related: Language, Listening, Writing)
"To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language."
- Jeanette Winterson
(Related: Fiction, Language, Past)
"Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy."
- Niklaus Wirth
(Related: People, Programming)
"Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages."
- Niklaus Wirth
(Related: Time, Quality, Development, Effort, Software, Will, Worth)
"My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation."
- Niklaus Wirth
(Related: Being, Influence, Language, Programming, Teaching)
"I have never designed a language for its own sake."
- Niklaus Wirth
(Related: Language)
"You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Language)
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Language, Limits, World)
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Intelligence, Battle, Language, Philosophy)
"The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Behavior, Language, Mankind)
"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Language, Misleading, Word)
"Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Language)
"Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Thought, Grammar, Harmony, Language, Reality)
"Language is wine upon the lips."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Language, Wine)
"What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself."
- Steve Wozniak
(Related: Computer, Games, Language, Play, Programming, Words)
"Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place."
- Judith Wright
(Related: Feelings, Emotions, Expression, Language)
"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."
- William Butler Yeats
(Related: People, Language, Man)
"I must stick with Chinese language films."
- Zhang Yimou
(Related: Language)
"I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out."
- Thom Yorke
(Related: Music, People, Language, Media)
"I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests."
- Thom Yorke
(Related: Music, Corporate, Fighting, Language, Media, Right, Weapons)
"China's cinema has been rising for some time; it has more exposure, so my chances of becoming internationally known are better. But the first thing I have to do is learn English. If I can grasp the language, then perhaps I can think about the U.S."
- Ziyi Zhang
(Related: Time, Cinema, English, First, Language)
"Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German."
- Stefan Zweig
(Related: Desperation, Disappointment, Language, Living, Misery, Today, Writers)