Language Quotes
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It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.
Andrei Codrescu
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The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.
Aaron Siskind
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Through yoga, meditation and other spiritual practices, we can learn the ways of personal equanimity. We can also learn how to use language in beneficial ways.
Satish Kumar
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If I have a foreign accent—which I much regret—it is cosmopolitan, but not Teutonic. I am a daughter of the great Jewish race, and my somewhat uncultivated language is the outcome of our enforced wanderings.
Sarah Bernhardt
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One limits oneself in this country if you come as a legal immigrant to this country and you choose to only speak your language whether it be Polish or Russian like many of my own relatives who came here if you speak only Russian and Polish you're limiting your opportunities in the United States.
Andrew Breitbart
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The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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I am a German nationalist, that means I am openly committed to my Volkstrum. All of my thoughts and actions belong to it. I am a socialist. I see before me no class or rank, but rather a community of people who are connected by blood, united by language, and subject to the same collective fate.
Adolf Hitler
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Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
Thomas Carlyle
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Like my aunt, alexithymics substitute the language of action for that of emotion. When asked, “How would you feel if you saw a truck coming at you at eighty miles per hour?” most people would say, “I’d be terrified” or “I’d be frozen with fear.” An alexithymic might reply, “How would I feel? I don’t know. . . . I’d get out of the way.”18 They tend to register emotions as physical problems rather than as signals that something deserves their attention. Instead of feeling angry or sad, they experience muscle pain, bowel irregularities, or other symptoms for which no cause can be found. About three quarters of patients with anorexia nervosa, and more than half of all patients with bulimia, are bewildered by their emotional feelings and have great difficulty describing them.19 When researchers showed pictures of angry or distressed faces to people with alexithymia, they could not figure out what those people were feeling.
Bessel van der Kolk
