Language Quotes

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

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.

What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.

I cannot bear the language TV chefs use - they don't seem able to look at a plate of vegetables without accusing it of sexual activity.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

We cannot be divided either by the languages we speak, by the faiths we profess or by the political views we choose.

It is the language of nature to which one has to listen.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

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

Chess is like a language, the top players are very fluent at it. Talent can be developed scientifically but you have to find first what you are good at.

I read nasheeds (Islamic songs) in English, in Arabic. I read nasheeds even in Bangla language. Now I don't just travel to meet people from my own country but people from the entire ummah.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

[My mother tongue is] Albanian. But, I am equally fluent in Bengali (language of Calcutta) and English.

We don't realize how much we create reality through language. If we say that life is hard, it will be hard.

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

In a costume, you need very exaggerated body language - as you say, sort of mime-type skills.

The language of women should be luminous, but not voluminous.

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.

The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the below things. They are the ones who gave us one of the most beautiful words in our language, the word enthusiasm.

I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried

He was feeling totally lost, leaving his family and country for a place where he knew nobody and didn't even speak the language.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

Hath any wounded thee with injuries? Meet them with patience. Hasty words rankle the wound; soft language dresses it.

I never paid you a compliment, Rachel, in my life. Successful love may sometimes use the language of flattery, I admit. But hopeless love, dearest, always speaks the truth.

Language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories.

Body language is more powerful than words.

The Catholic faith never changes. But the language and mode of manifesting this one faith can change according to peoples, times and places.

Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable.

I love the language, it sounds as if it should be writ on satin with syllables which breathe of the sweet South

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.

To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.

I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.

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.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

Language is a social art.

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

The menu is not the meal.

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.

The managerial class has forced on us a public language that makes no sense

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.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.

If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

[Sexism is] behavior, policy, language, or other action of men or women which expresses the institutionalized, systematic, comprehensive, or consistent view that women are inferior.