Language Quotes
-
A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament.
Arthur Conan Doyle
-
I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.
Ben Lerner
-
Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it. So if, from perhaps some unhealthy desire for sympathetic support, you describe your life in negative terms you will find that this will reinforce your mind's negative emotions and make you unhappy and even more susceptible to feeling unhappy in the future. By simply doing the reverse and focusing on why you are lucky and grateful things are not worse, you will strengthen and increase your mind's positive emotions and make yourself happy and even more likely to feel happy in the future.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
-
Poetry takes you into the recesses of the language, the neglected corners, cracks and crannies and to the big sky of wonder. It opens the door to a critique without which you have rather boring analytical tools by comparison. To cultivate poetry means to stay with it. Not to abandon hope, but to abide.
C.D. Wright
-
Instrumental music can spread the international language.
Herb Alpert
-
If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.
M. Scott Peck
-
Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.
Bela Lugosi
-
Language should fulfill your individual existence as a wholesome human being... Language should be more than just getting by.
Chogyam Trungpa
-
A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories.
George Eliot
-
Language builds on our cognitive capacities to reason about the goals and intentions of other people, on our desire to imitate, our desire to communicate, and our twin capacities for using convention to name things and sequence to indicate differences between differing possibilities.
Gary Marcus
-
Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.
Terence McKenna
-
One barrier... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.
David Perkins
-
Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
William Hazlitt
-
The chief virtue that language can have is clarity.
Hippocrates
-
Fie, fie upon her!
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
William Shakespeare
-
Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.
Miguel de Cervantes
