Language Quotes
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It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.
Northrop Frye
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Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.
Russell Baker
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I know that some subjective experiences of sex are very firm and fundamental, even unchangeable. They can be so firm and unchanging that we call them "innate". But given that we report on such a sense of self within a social world, a world in which we are trying to use language to express what we feel, it is unclear what language does that most effectively. I understand that "innate" is a word that conveys the sense of something hired-wired and constitutive. I suppose I would be inclined to wonder whether other vocabularies might do the job equally well.
Judith Butler
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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
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You can’t translate something
that was never in a language
in the first place.
Chase Twichell
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The importance of an artist is bringing new signs into a language.
Steve Sabol
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I've always liked language and been a big reader. I always loved books as objects. My favorite time of year as a child was September when we'd go buy all kinds of notebooks and pens and markers for school. I think I wanted to be a writer just so I'd be able to fill up all those pages.
Elaine Equi
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Suffering belongs to no language.
Adelia Prado
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This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
Terence McKenna
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I've done so many interviews over the years in so many different languages. Radios. Papers. Magazines. There's always another interview to do. It's quite something, I have to say.
Roger Federer
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Music, the word we use in our everyday language, is nothing less than the picture of our Beloved. It is because music is the picture of our Beloved that we love music.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
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On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.
Heather O'Neill
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French, for example, is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort.
David Graddol
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When Mr. Miyamoto says easy, he doesnt mean simple. He means easily -- this is the difficulty of the language here. Its accessible, and you know how to do things, if not necessarily what to do. You may have a series of puzzles to figure out, and it may be difficult to decipher the meaning, but its not difficult to accomplish what you need to do.
Eiji Aonuma
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Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
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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
