Language Quotes
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My biggest challenge was obviously the language issue as I didn’t speak a word of English when I moved to London. As a young teenager, I had a major identity crisis at the time and felt like I lost all my future, friends and ability to express myself to anyone.
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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.
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Just as surely as every new language mastered opens up a new world, so knowledge of a Beethoven, a Chopin, or a Schumann opens up a new world in spiritual beauty and thought.
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I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner.
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I listened to a lot of tapes of British theatre actresses and tried to learn from them. As Americans, we don't have such a gift with language.
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Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
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Though representatives of many ethnic groups came together in the United States, English became their common language. Apparently, this was a natural choice. One can imagine what would have happened if members of each nation moving to the U.S. had spoken only their own tongues and refused to learn English.
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We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
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If our language and culture are not passed on to immigrants, where will they learn to value integrity in government and the rule of law?
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Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
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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.
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I am a serial monogamist of sorts, and have been with my girlfriend for almost four years. In imagining my brain back to worlds where I might be around someone other sexed in that way and not know them that well, speaking out loud almost seems like requiring of demon language, or money spurting.
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Russian is a very deceptive language, because it looks easy at first: it's like setting out for a gentle stroll and realizing that you've committed yourself to scaling Himalayan peaks.
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It was as though I found the language I'd wanted from photography; the expression that I got partly from photography, I got completely from cooking.
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The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the American language, and not the English language.
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When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.
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It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
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It is impossible to disassociate language from science...To call forth a concept, a word is needed.
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The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
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Grammar is the analysis of language.
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A text conversation is a short exchange of often grossly truncated language that corresponds to a thought made all the more shallow by the process.
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I believe the United States should allow all foreigners in this country, provided they can speak our native language... Apache.
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If Language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant. If what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done, remains undone.
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Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.
