Language Quotes

Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.

I think one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.

So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is compromised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.

We cannot rely on our native tongue if our spouse does not understand it. If we want them to feel the love we are trying to communicate, we must express it in his or her primary love language.

Each culture might lend its own dialect, but above all that is the language of music itself, and it doesn't care about politics or boundaries.

Dig -- the mostly uncouth -- language of grace.

Libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age.

My grandfather, mother and father were gifted verbally, and my mother passed that along to me. She always made sure I was conscious of language and words.

The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition.

Language always gives you away.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.

To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.

I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know.

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

That is not good language which all understand not.

There were no ill language, if it were not ill taken.

Faire language grates not the tongue.

Procrastination is the longest word in the language, but there's only one letter between its ends when they occupy their proper places in the alphabet.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

There is a language barrier between vets and the civilian population. They speak different languages.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

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

If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do.

There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

At Ungaro, I discovered the flou and the language of Paris.

All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.

Even before I started photography, I began to see that there was a disjunction between available languages and reality.

Music is the language of the heart, and conservatives always screw it up.

Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

I hold 'Mi Tierra,' my first Spanish-language album, very close to me because that was all done in my native tongue and won me my first Grammy.

You've got a new Spanish-language album out now ["90 Millas," released in September of 2007], and the single ["No Llores"] is #1 on the Billboard Latin chart.

I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt.

I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.

Playing characters that speak a very violent language was my livelihood.

I don't have any phobias with any language, and I've grown up listening to Anglo-American rock n roll as well as Welsh-language punk rock and I'm all for sharing languages.

I've always had an ear for languages and music so it's something I'm continually working on but it's fun.

The Wars is a great book, rich in its images, its language, its construction, and, ultimately, its conception.

Music is enough of an expression that it doesn't really matter what the words are or what language it's in.

Each language gives you something different so that's a good enough reason for you to learn it.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

That's a true actor's nightmare: "Improvise in British sign language. Go."

The abuse of terms has at all times been an evil.

We have to come back to something like ordinary language after all when we want to talk "about" mathematics!

When someone's an actor and you're an actor, you meet them and you feel like you know them. We're in the same business, and we all speak the same comedy language.

I have a good ear for languages.