Language Quotes
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All language is a popularity contest.
Erin McKean
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There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, and sand eddies in a whirlwind.
Dante Alighieri
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Which brings us to the least sexy word in the English language, kids," Dad said, kicking back in his chair. "Inbreeding. Avoid it.
Sarah Rees Brennan
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The language of imagination is the native language of man. It is the language of his excited intellect, of his aroused passions, of his devotion, of all the higher moods and temperaments of his mind.
George Gilfillan
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Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
Terence McKenna
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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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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.
Elisabeth Murdoch
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I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch - it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.
Nick Cave
The Birthday Party
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There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
Eugene H. Peterson
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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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The First Amendment's language leaves no room for inference that abridgments of speech and press can be made just because they are slight. That Amendment provides, in simple words, that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." I read "no law . . . abridging" to mean no law abridging.
Hugo Black
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Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help.
Thomas Keating
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Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.
William J. Mitchell
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In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.
Elliott Colla
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He who knows other languages feels even closer to his own language.
Kató Lomb
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Silence is God's language, and it's a very difficult language to learn.
Thomas Keating
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The father threw up on the ground. In the vomit, there were errors--strings not vomit, but language, light. The bunched up bits were writing something, words at once sunk into the ground.
Blake Butler
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Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information.
Betty Edwards
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But for the unquiet heart and brain
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise
Like dull narcotics numbing pain.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue.
Ken Robinson
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I've been working a lot with identity and roots, being part of your roots. I went into this topic where I was trying to break the stereotype of Arabic language. The non-translation work, this is where I make the switch, where you don't need to translate.
eL Seed
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I don’t set out to speak a comprehensible language. But my language is authentic.
Bram van Velde
