Languages Quotes
Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.
Soren Kierkegaard
I don't speak anything fluently, but I love picking up languages and I do this Duolingo app. I started when I moved to Sweden, when I was about 19, 20. I really loved the language; it was super melodic and really sexy.
Eliot Paulina Sumner
His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.
Charles Dickens
So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they're stressing. They're talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together.
Michael Emerson
We can appreciate each other's languages. And the question of being uncomfortable about our languages would go away.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The 'thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for.
Friedrich Nietzsche
With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.
Edmund de Waal
In difficult times, people just like to hear music. They like to be moved by what they hear. And music speaks different languages.
Itzhak Perlman
The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
"We speak different languages, as usual," responded Woland, "but this does not change the things we speak about. Well?..."
Mikhail Bulgakov
His best-selling book, The Goal, has sold over 6 million copies and has been translated into 35 languages. It continues to be required reading in major business schools.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.
Edith Grossman
