Language Quotes
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When you lose a spouse, you're a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you're an orphan. When you lose a child, there's no word in the English language for that position, that place that you're left.
Frances McDormand
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The superior man undergoes three changes. Looked at from a distance, he appears stern; when approached, he is mild; when he is heard to speak, his language is firm and decided.
Confucius
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Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy.
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
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For me, French is so rich and so sacred that learning it is like learning a foreign language.
Fabrice Luchini
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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 language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo; And now my tongue's use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
William Shakespeare
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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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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
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The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
Jonathan Swift
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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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Like the destroyer, the submarine has created its own type of officer and man with language and traditions apart from the rest of the service, and yet at the heart unchangingly of the Service.
Rudyard Kipling
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I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.
William Labov
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I love the French language... it's a delightful language, especially to curse with. It's like whopping your ass with silk.
Oscar Wilde
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To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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In # France we have a saying, 'Joie de Vivre,' which actually doesn't exist in the English language. It means looking at your life as something that is to be taken with great pleasure and enjoy it.
Mireille Guiliano
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…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
Albert Camus
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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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Language is the source of misunderstandings.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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I love variety. I love theater. I also love radio. I love language. But, the older you get, you need to earn money. You need to heighten your profile.
Indira Varma
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The art of music, rather more daughter than imitator of nature, in her impressive and mysterious language minding and educating us, rouses directly our temper and rules us to the depths of our souls.
Carl Maria von Weber
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I knew that all South Indian language films were first made in Chennai and that Tamil Nadu is one of the biggest film-producing centres in the country. I wanted to be part of films here.
Nargis Fakhri
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Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.
Alain Finkielkraut
