Language Quotes
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One of the reasons why language is so sick right now and cliché-ridden and lame and boring and laid-out, and about to go to sleep, is because there aren't a thousand Tom Clarks. If I were writing a prescription right now, you know, if I had my shiny thing here, a stethoscope around my neck, that's the prescription I'd write. Take one thousand Tom Clarks before going to bed.
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What the elements are to chemistry, what the sounds are to music, are words to language.
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When you speak a foreign language, you become someone else. If you aren't used to speaking a language, and you start speaking it again, for the first few sentences you'll find yourself in very strange shape, because you're still the person who was speaking the first language. But if you keep speaking that language, you will become the person who corresponds to it.
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No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
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It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.
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The Universe is a grand book which cannot be read until one first learns to comprehend the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics.
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You can’t translate something that was never in a language in the first place.
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The choosing among words is made by every user of the language, and not exclusively by professional speakers and writers.
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The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything.
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Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information.
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It's increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose - or of a moral language - within government, media or business, could become one of the most dangerous own goals for capitalism and for freedom.
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Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.
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Sport is a universal language, building more bridges between people than anything else I can think of.
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Many persons entertain a prejudice against mathematical language, arising out of a confusion between the ideas of a mathematical science and an exact science. ...in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.
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Sometimes, you just have to reassure the ones you love in precise language that you'll always be there. Sometimes words are enough.
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Suffering belongs to no language.
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All of us in Quebec - and I mean all of us - have allowed language to become a preoccupation that works to the disadvantage of all of us - and I mean all of us.
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People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech. When I started writing, I thought [the language] was telling the story of this country: old people in a young nation, very religious, very conservative, very tight-assed, but also very anarchistic, very open-minded. It's all in the language, and that's one thing that doesn't translate.
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Everything starts to break down, however, when a species gains language. What we talk about isn’t what we experience—we speak chiefly of interesting things, and those tend to be things that are uncommon.
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Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules.
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If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.
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Certain issues in philosophy of science (having to do with observation and the definition of a theory's empirical import) had beenmisconstrued as issues in philosophy of logic and of language. With respect to modality, I hold the exact opposite: important philosophical problems concerning language have been misconstrued as relating to the content of science and the nature of the world. This is not at all new, but is the traditional nominalist line.
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Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.
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Words are the weak support of cold indifference; love has no language to be heard.
