Language Quotes
-
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.
Raymond Carver
-
How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone comes into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test’s most central questions—the most central questions of being human.
Brian Christian
-
Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human.
Carmen Boullosa
-
I believe that we must use language. If it is used in a feminist perspective, with a feminist sensibility, language will find itself changed in a feminist manner. It will nonetheless be the language. You can't not use this universal instrument; you can't create an artificial language, in my opinion. But naturally, each writer must use it in his/her own way.
Simone de Beauvoir
-
The extraordinary language of Nonviolent Communication is changing how parents relate to children, teachers to students, and how we all related to each other and even to ourselves. It is precise, disciplined, and enormously compassionate. Most important, once we study NVC we can't ignore the potential for transformation that lies in any difficult relationship - if we only bother to communicate with skill and empathy.
Bernie Glassman
-
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.
Steve Huffman
-
When you act, you want to emote and think in that language. I don't enjoy the process of doing a film in a language I am not good with.
Suriya
-
Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.
Diane Ackerman
-
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
-
So when I heard that we don't have our names, we don't speak our true Arabic language, we were robbed of Islam, our true religion, and we've been made deaf, dumb, and blind in slavery.And Elijah Muhammad was taught by Allah, who we refer to as God, to teach us the truth that will free us.And when I heard it, I've been free ever since. I have no racial problems, I don't go where I'm not wanted.
Muhammad Ali
-
Lexicographers are language reporters.
Erin McKean
-
Even though I started playing the violin when I was four, my early chamber music experiences helped build a strong foundation for my solo work, as all music is a rich language and dialogue that is shared on stage, no matter what the size of the ensemble.
Anne Akiko Meyers
-
Two of the chief defenders of the faith in the Old Testament and in the New - Moses and Paul - were both well-versed in the language, the thinking, and the philosophy of their cultures.
Ravi Zacharias
-
The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.
William Osler
-
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
-
The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
Elliot W. Eisner
-
When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
Etgar Keret
-
I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
Stephen Fry
-
Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.
William J. Mitchell
-
There's a whole language to movement and how you embody someone, and how you can use different techniques for different characters. I guess just posture, and the way you walk, and the way you physically are. All of that says a lot about who someone is.
Mia Wasikowska
-
You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
Ethan Canin
-
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
-
Time is said to have only one dimension, and space to have three dimensions. ... The mathematical quaternion partakes of both these elements; in technical language it may be said to be 'time plus space', or 'space plus time': and in this sense it has, or at least involves a reference to, four dimensions. And how the One of Time, of Space the Three, Might in the Chain of Symbols girdled be.
William Rowan Hamilton
-
Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyous words in the language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying.
Elise M. Boulding
