Language Quotes

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries.

I've been writing plays since the third grade. The biggest difference now is that professionals act in them rather than eight year olds...and the language is a bit more "colorful".

At some point in the next century the number of invented languages will probably overtake the number of surviving natural languages.

An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

Every day, we communicate more with our energy, body language, face and eyes. That really is what communication is, and not so much words. And it's rare that you get to explore that in a film.

When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.

% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words.

When you speak, ask questions. Don't lecture.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

JS will be a real functional language.

The laws of biology are written in the language of diversity.

To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue.

The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.

Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

My French is still good. That's a beautiful language and I'm happy to speak it.

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.

You can make initial contact with someone who does not speak your language with signs or smiles, but to communicate you need words. So it is with a nation; to understand it you have to read its books

Never underestimate the role pretension plays when it comes to creating euphemistic language.

I remember reading once that some fellows use language to conceal thought; but it's been my experience that a good many more use it instead of thought.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Everyone wants a hug and kiss. It translates into any language.

Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

Art is a wholly physical language whose words are all the visible objects.

Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.

As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

I find it strange that there isn't more of a melting pot of language within the pop charts. I feel it becomes really two dimensional when everything's in English.

When words fail to express the exalted sentiments and finer emotions of the human heart, music becomes the sublimated language of the soul, the divine instrumentality for its higher utterance.

All German women are beautiful. It's not for nothing that we talk of the German "Fräuleinwunder." You don't get this word in any other language.

Denmark is like a secret little place with its own special language.

All of us are displaced. Few people live where their great-grandparents lived or speak the language their great-grandparents spoke.

The poet is a master of language, the schizophrenic is a slave to it.

Too many women in too many countries speak the same language, of silence.

The piano is really the featured instrument of a 10-piece chamber orchestra. The construction is the harmonic language.

Language does not make one an elite.

I am lucky that the Western world chooses me to play roles in their movies an television, whatever language it may be.

Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.