Language Quotes
-
It was an identity crisis. I was born and raised in France, but I never really felt French, so I needed to find something that I was more connected to. I used to go back to Tunisia every summer, but I was more into the language, my Arabic roots.
eL Seed
-
Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.
Rowan Williams
-
Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.
William Irwin Thompson
-
People are often shy to acknowledge that they are Bengalis. They somehow take pride in saying that they cannot speak or read the language.
Mithun Chakraborty
-
To say a grid is limiting is to say that language is limiting, or typography is limiting. It is up to us to use these media critically or passively.
Ellen Lupton
-
To rob, to ravage, to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace.
Tacitus
-
Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.
Erica Jong
-
A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.
Sherman Alexie
-
paraphrasing.."Science is the language of the intellect of society. Art is language of the entire human personality.
Naguib Mahfouz
-
Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; - all this comes of Authorship.
Lord Byron
-
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George Steiner
-
What we're trying to do as writers is rescue, preserve this space of thoughtfulness of language, of a deeper and more honest appreciation of our reality. And, so, we have to work even harder as writers against this tide of silliness, against this tide of superficiality, against this horrible Greek chorus on Twitter where everyone is insulting each other and now we have an insulter-in-chief, who's risen to the presidency by insulting people.
Hector Tobar
-
How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.
Black Hawk
-
How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone comes into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test’s most central questions—the most central questions of being human.
Brian Christian
-
No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.
Edwin Percy Whipple
-
The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics.” Math is a way to describe reality and figure out how the world works, a universal language that has become the gold standard of truth. In our world, increasingly driven by science and technology, mathematics is becoming, ever more, the source of power, wealth, and progress. Hence those who are fluent in this new language will be on the cutting edge of progress.
Edward Frenkel
-
Every form of power comes down to language. In law, there's all kinds of words you don't know if you're not a lawyer and that gives them power. In business, it's the same thing.
Anthony Robbins
-
The subtle differences in language and humor that get lost in translation, for example, make it almost impossible for big companies to do something that will appeal at home and abroad.
Larry Gelbart
-
The four sweetest words in the English language — 'You wore me down.'
Aziz Ansari
-
Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history.
Etgar Keret
-
Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different 'values', to use the language of painters?
Friedrich Nietzsche
-
That I was a writer was further proof of God’s far-sightedness; she was convinced that by some magic of propinquity she would acquire a mastery of the English language.
Bel Kaufman
-
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Lucille Clifton
-
A language is a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought.
Elena Ferrante
