Language Quotes
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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.
Etgar Keret
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I see tendencies, I see body language.
Michael Chang
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Numbers constitute the only universal language.
Nathanael West
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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
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Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.
Terence McKenna
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If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Terence McKenna
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The goal of 'Data Detectives' is to spark the imagination of students around the globe by making them think about new technologies that will impact humanity in ways similar to language and art.
Rick Smolan
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Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.
Susanne Langer
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If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.
Herbie Hancock
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The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love.
Paul Eluard
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Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.
Eric Maisel
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
Terry Eagleton
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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
Terence McKenna
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The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.
Michael Eric Dyson
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How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
Herbert Spencer
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Prepare yourselves mentally. A mission requires a great deal of mental preparation. You must memorize missionary discussions, memorize scriptures, and oftentimes learn a new language. The discipline to do this is learned in your early years. Establish now the daily practice of reading the scriptures ten to fifteen minutes each day. If you do so, by the time you reach the mission field, you will have read all four of the standard works. I urge you to read particularly the Book of Mormon so that you can testify of its truthfulness as the Lord has directed.
Ezra Taft Benson
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It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.
Terence McKenna