Language Quotes

No language which lends itself to visualizability can describe quantum jumps.

Language is the dress of thought; every time you talk your mind is on parade.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute.

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Speak the language of the person you want to become.

Hispanics speak Spanish or Portuguese, which are languages we Americans are familiar with, so it doesn't seem to pose the same types of problems as Arabic-speaking Muslims do in Europe.

There is no language without deceit.

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language.

I'm bugged because I can't believe I can't speak every language there is. But I feel I can when I sit and am with somebody, and I can dance for them. Because dance is dialogue without language.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

I decided to come back and teach goodness in this business. To teach love, because music is the universal language. We are God's bouquet, and through music we become one.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images.

The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language.

[Languages] became a tool that served me my whole life.

Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify naturally, but at our pleasure.

It is the body, subject to the harmony of the steps it is executing, which speaks. And it speaks to the heart in as direct a language as does music.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

Music is a language, a universal language.

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.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.

Some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and state.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.

It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.

I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit--a language to use against these sparkling insects, these jets.

Our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

Quiet talk is the language of love. It is the language of peace. It is the language of God.

I have to admit that I don't even try to speak Russian, though I understand it perfectly. I wouldn't want to insult the language by testing out my pronunciations

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance.

Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.