Language Quotes
-
I had always regarded language as more a question of utility than identity. Therefore, I promptly noted that all the (EU) meetings should be conducted in English and French. My older colleagues laughed. Later I understood why. On the second day of the Finnish presidency (of the EU) a German delegation refused to participate in an informal ministerial meeting because no German interpretation had been arranged.
Alexander Stubb
-
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
Thomas Bulfinch
-
A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
Paul Graham
-
If I as a geologist were called upon to explain briefly our modern ideas of the origin of the earth and the development of life on it to a simple, pas- toral people, such as the tribes to whom the Book of Genesis was addressed, I could hardly do better than follow rather closely much of the language of the first chapter of Genesis.
Wallace Pratt
-
Attempting to build a language wall around Quebec is precisely the wrong policy to follow. It will keep out of Quebec exactly what we need to attract by way of talent and capital; it will drive our best - francophones as well as allophones and anglophones, with their talents and capital - to leave Quebec.
Dick Pound
-
The lapse of ages changes all things - time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing about, around, and underneath man, except man himself.
Lord Byron
-
Armstrong was the key creator of the mature working language of jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of a century since his influence first began to spread, not a single musician who has mastered that language fails to make daily use, knowingly or unknowingly, of something that was invented by Louis Armstrong.
Dan Morgenstern
-
Language is the currency of consciousness. We speak to fill the void. We write it down to remember.
Andrew Lakey
-
Every individual or national degeneration is immediately revealed by a directly proportional degradation in language.
Joseph de Maistre
-
When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.
William H. Hunt
-
Beauty is undefinable in language. It's something that you see when you see it, or you feel when you feel it, or you hear when you hear it. It usually encompasses all five of the senses. It can't exist without it being a somehow sensorial experience. But, I don't think it's quantifiable. Nothing is really quantifiable. Nothing is certain in love and friendship. We all try to understand these things.
Colin Farrell
-
Words fail me sometimes. I have read most every word in the Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language, but I still have trouble making them come when I want them to. Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get – a cold sick feeling deep down inside – when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know you will never be the same again.
Jennifer Donnelly
-
Sensationalism only works for so long. Think of something like the Kony 2012 campaign. Its sensationalized, viral language got people all hot and bothered, but at the end of the day, there was so much it got wrong about the situation, and that did more damage to their cause than what they got right.
Uzodinma Iweala
-
Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
Ernest Hemingway
-
I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.
Red Smith
-
When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.
Allen Lacy
-
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
Thomas Carlyle
-
Twenty miles on, we have spotted a roadside sign: 'CHAINSAW CARVED MUSHROOMS'. Troubles promptly forgotten, Stuart falls to gawping at the road ahead. What could it all be about? 'As one victim to another,' his body language seems to marvel, 'What's a mushroom done to deserve that kind of abuse?' Not even in the worst days of street-fighting did he ever experience ill-treatment on this scale.
Alexander Masters
-
Now, mark it. This may be strong language, but heed it. The people mean it, and, my friends of the Eastern Democracy, we bid farewell when you do that thing.
Richard Parks Bland
-
I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn't bad... I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing. But it's become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.
Adrian Matejka
-
Would I describe a preacher, I would express him simple, grave, sincere; In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain, And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste, And natural in gesture; much impress'd Himself, as conscious of his awful charge, And anxious mainly that the flock he feeds May feel it too; affectionate in look, And tender in address, as well becomes A messenger of grace to guilty men.
William Cowper
-
For strictly scientific or technological purposes all this is irrelevant. On a pragmatic view, as on a religious view, theory and concepts are held in faith. On the pragmatic view the only thing that matters is that the theory is efficacious, that it 'works' and that the necessary preliminaries and side issues do not cost too much in time and effort. Beyond that, theory and concepts go to constitute a language in which the scientistic matters at issue can be formulated and discussed.
Bertram Brockhouse