Language Quotes
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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
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The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave.
Ernest Hemingway
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Alice thought to herself, 'Then there's no use in speaking.' The voices didn't join in this time, as she hadn't spoken, but to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means--for I must confess that I don't), 'Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!
Lewis Carroll
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The key to integration is a common language and that happens to be German here -- and we can demand that.
Edmund Stoiber
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The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character; and, more often than not, he ends up becoming what the German language so appropriately calls a Fachidiot (professional idiot).
Erwin Chargaff
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He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.
Emily Bronte
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Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
William Gibson
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How do I pity those who (assuming the name of friends) surround themselves with maxims importing the wisdom of doubt and suspicion, 'til they impose on themselves that very hard task of laboring through life without ever knowing a human creature to whom they can make the proper use of language and freely speak the dictates of their hearts!
Sarah Fielding
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Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.
Winslow Homer
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There is no language without deceit.
Italo Calvino
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The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language.
Ernest Cline
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It's nonsense to say that it's not in the bill. The reality is that the bill they will have passed to the Senate will have this language in it.
David Keating
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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
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When you speak a new language you must see if you can translate all of the poetry of your old language into the new one.
Dana Scott
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All language is a popularity contest.
Erin McKean
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To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing - what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.
Gerhard Richter
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I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.
Wole Soyinka
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Cato, being scurrilously treated by a low and vicious fellow, quietly said to him, "A contest between us is very unequal, for thou canst bear ill language with ease, and return it with pleasure; but to me it is unusual to hear, and disagreeable to speak it." There are none more abusive to others than they that lie most open to it themselves; but the humor goes round, and he that laughs at me today will have somebody to laugh at him tomorrow.
Seneca the Younger
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You have to have a little humility if you're Danish because you're never going to be able to travel outside the country unless you can speak another language.
Sidse Babett Knudsen
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I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen - whose language nobody can speak - to be very good permaculture people.
Bill Mollison
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The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Delicate, gracious, and eloquent, John Brandi's poems reveal that he remains an extraordinary profound poet of prayer and praise. His is the most honorable and heroic of ambitions - to dress our broken world in the clothes of language, trust, and hope.
David St. John
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The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology.
Paul Davies
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He who knows other languages feels even closer to his own language.
Kató Lomb