Language Quotes
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Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.
John Ruskin
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A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.
Mahatma Gandhi
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By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely.
Karl Buhler
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Language is at the core of the intellectual and emotional life of every personality….It is used for the trivia of (everyday) living, on the labour market, in professional activities, in several forms of recreation, in church, in clubs, in schools, and so on. We will mention later the difficulties, which may be dramatic in their intensity, faced by a bilingual person who must work in his second language – his sense of being diminished, the irritation which frequently results, and his loss of efficiency.
Andre Laurendeau
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Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George Steiner
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I come from a place where you don't need to talk all the time. There are sign languages you learn.
Warwick Thornton
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We at Google have made tremendous advances in understanding language. Our knowledge graph has been fundamental to that. The new algorithm that we launched today called Hummingbird has been a great leap forward.
Amit Singhal
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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
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What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast.
William Matthews
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Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.
Judith Wright
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We have a word game in English called "Twenty questions." To play Twenty Questions, one player imagines some object, and the other players must guess what it is by asking questions that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no." I imagine every language has a similar game, and, for those of us who speak the language of science, the game is called The Scientific Method.
Karl Barry Sharpless
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The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.
Michelle Alexander
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C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good.
Bertrand Meyer
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The louder our world today is, the deeper God seems to remain in silence. Silence is the language of eternity; noise passes.
Gertrud von Le Fort
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In short, every adventure of the mind is an adventure vehicled by words. Every adventure of the mind is an adventure with words; every such adventure is an adventure among words; and occasionally an adventure is an adventure of words. It is no exaggeration to say that, in every word of every language — every single word or phrase of every language, however primitive or rudimentary or fragmentarily recorded, and whether living or dead- we discover an enlightening, sometimes a rather frightening, vignette of history; with such a term as water we find that we require a volume rather than a vignette. Sometimes the history concerned may seem to affect only an individual. But, as John Donne remarked in 1624, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ History is not merely individual, it is collective or social; not only national, but international; not simply terrestrial, but universal. History being recorded in words and achieved partly, sometimes predominantly, by words, it follows that he who despises or belittles or does no worse than underestimate, the value and power, the ineluctable necessity of words, despises all history and therefore despises mankind (himself perhaps excluded). He who ignores the enduring power and the history of words ignores that sole part of himself which can, after his death, influence the world outside himself, the sole part that merits a posterity.
Eric Partridge
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Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
George Steiner
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I don’t set out to speak a comprehensible language. But my language is authentic.
Bram van Velde
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There are only two feelings, Love and fear:
There are only two languages, Love and fear:
There are only two activities, Love and fear:
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results, Love and fear,
Love and fear.
Michael Leunig
