Language Quotes
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Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!
William Halsey
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The wonderful thing about writing for theatre is you can go anywhere you want with the language. There are no limits. With film, they frown on language - it's always 'Too many words.'
Sam Shepard
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Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.
Irving Howe
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As long as you are successful and winning matches, the language is no problem at all. But when the results are insufficient, the difficulties begin. At this time, a coach needs to go into more detail with his instructions, and that's where the problems can lie.
Ottmar Hitzfeld
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Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.
Sam Shepard
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Because of our kinship in suffering, our channels of contact have always been charged with the language of the heart.
William Griffith Wilson
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With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.
Kingsley Amis
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The Culture of Do and Tell The main inhibitor of Humble Inquiry is the culture in which we grew up. Culture can be thought of as manifesting itself on many levels—it is represented by all of its artifacts, by which I mean buildings, art works, products, language, and everything that we see and feel when we enter another culture.
Edgar Schein
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For the very young, there's nothing better than Mother Goose and anything by Dr. Seuss for the rhythms and language.
Nathaniel Philbrick
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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
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Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.
Humphry Davy
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The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
Hippocrates
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The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning.
Yehuda Amichai
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Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
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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
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I like the sound of that, crashing Monica's party," he glanced at Michael, then quickly away. "What about you? That break some kind of vampire rules or something?" "Blow me Shane." "Boys," Eve said primly. "Language. Minor at the table." "Well," Shane said, "I wasn't actually planning to do it." Claire rolled her eyes. "Not like it's the first time I've heard it. Or said it." "You shouldnt say it," Michael said, all seriousness. "No, I mean it. Girls should say 'eat me' not 'blow me'. Wouldn't recommend 'bite me' though. Not around here.
Rachel Caine
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It's very easy to lose language - it can be shut off in a second.
Sam Shepard
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It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
Brian Friel
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The language in New Mexico is very different. At first when you hear the speech here, you don't really know what to do with it, but then I just went with it, because as a writer as well as a translator I do believe that translated words are not different names for the same thing. They're different names for different things. I tried to stay as true as I could, so I used Ruben Cobos' dictionary of Southwestern Spanish, and when I went into Spanish I never assumed the word I would use would be the word a nuevomexicano would use.
Ana Castillo
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We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.
Willard Van Orman Quine