Language Quotes
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Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
William Hazlitt
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If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
Confucius
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Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
George Steiner
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My language! heavens!I am the best of them that speak this speech. Were I but where 'tis spoken.
William Shakespeare
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The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.
William Colby
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Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives.
Beth Kephart
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English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that intrudes into our intellectual environment.
Willard Gaylin
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...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional "victims" who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.
Gad Saad
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Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.
Herbert Spencer
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All of the 29 Marines that I went in [with], we got together and made a code in our own language. There were over 400 or 500 words that we made up at that time. We memorized them and everything was up here.
Chester Nez
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Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.
Errol Morris
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Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only just the language of the Muslims, but it's also the language of the Hindus.
Ismail Merchant
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The adjective is the enemy of the noun and the adverb the enemy of damn near everything else. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language.
Alfred Bertram Guthrie
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The older you get, the more power you have with language as a writer, which means that you have to be extra responsible for what you say, whether it's in print or in front of a microphone, because those words can go out and kill or go out and plant seeds for peace.
Sandra Cisneros
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We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.
Anne Carson
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Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise - that which is common to you, me, and everybody.
T. E. Hulme
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Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.
Mary Pipher
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Even if you're a genius and you invent your own language, it doesn't become a language until there are people using it.
Eyvind Kang
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There was a patient look on the old man's face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.
Sarah Orne Jewett
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Cooking was my lingua franca, my love language.
Barbara O'Neal
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A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.
Jose Rizal
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You, my Brown Guard, will regard it as a matter of course that this German people should go only by the way which Providence ordained for it when it gave to Germans the common language. So we go forward with the profoundest faith in God into the future. Would that which we have achieved have been possible if Providence had not helped us?
Adolf Hitler
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The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself. It's like being blind. You aren't less of a person, but you're missing out on wonderful things.
Sandra Cisneros