L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Language can also be play and music and beauty and desire and grief and rage and truth without always having to be message-driven or purely functional. Moving away from "useful" doesn't mean it isn't necessary. You can still need poetry while also needing money or food or physical health.”
“Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.”
“Language can be used to so many diverse ends. It can be used to clarify and, of course, it can be used to obfuscate, confuse, evade.”
“Language can be very adept at hiding the truth.”
“Language can do what it can’t say.”
Source: Crossing unmarked snow: further views on the writer's vocation
“Language can express the world in all its entirety. Perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words, but a thousand words can still describe the scene that one sees before him, ten thousand words can subvert the coming of dusk, and a hundred thousand words can reshape the fabric of the world.”
Source: バッカーノ！1934 娑婆編 Alice In Jails
“Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.”
“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”
Source: Language and Silence
“Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.”
“language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.”
Source: how to save your own life
“Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.”
“Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.”
“Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it.”
Source: Georgia Scenes
“Language cannot say everything, fortunately.”
“Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.”
Source: The Straight Mind: And Other Essays
“Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development”
“Language changes only those aspects of our consciousness which are based on information, but not the feelings themselves. The words are as stones that can cause wounds or as caresses that becalm and that guide us, but the content of consciousness is intrinsic.”
“Language changes very fast.”
“Language changes. If it does not change, like Latin it dies. But we need to be aware that as our language changes, so does our theology change, particularly if we are trying to manipulate language for a specific purpose. That is what is happening with our attempts at inclusive language, which thus far have been inconclusive and unsuccessful.”
“Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.”
“Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.”
“Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.”
“Language construction will BREED a mythology. J.R.R. Tolkien”
Source: The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
“Language conveys a certain power. It is one of the instruments of domination. It is carefully guarded by the superior people because it is one of the means through which they conserve their supremacy.”
Source: Threads Through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography
“Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient.”
“Language could be used as an instrument of control, a way of establishing hierarchies that suggest one set of people is better or more special than another. Through language, one automatically identifies one's place within a social and cultural hierarchy and we all carry with us illogical attitudes about the bearers of particular language, based on our own cultural background and continued exposure to local political ideals.”
Source: Left to Right: The Cultural Shift from Words to Pictures
“Language creates reality. Words have power. Speak always to create joy.”
“Language designed to impress builds a gulf. Language to express builds a bridge.”
“Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming.”
“Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person’s ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue.”
Source: The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
“Language develops by interacting with other people talking to you.”
“Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”
Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: German and English
“Language disguises thought.”
Source: Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”
Source: Understanding media: the extensions of man
“Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes.”
Source: On writing: a memoir of the craft
“Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... To make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.”
Source: On Writing
“Language does not construct being ex novo: it questions it, in some way always finding something already given (even though being already given does not mean being already finished and completed). Even if being were moth-eaten, there would always be a fabric whose warp and web, confused by the infinite holes that have eaten into it, still subsist in some stubborn way.”
Source: Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition
“Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.”
“Language does not make one an elite.”
“Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.”
Source: WORD PLAY WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE TALK
“Language does our thinking for us.”
Source: The Legacy of Kenneth Burke
“Language doesn't fit onto reality like a toy fitting into a slot. Reality is actually one thing and language something else.”
“Language doesn't belong to grammarians, linguists, wordsmiths, writers, or editors. It belongs to the people who use it. It goes where people want it to go, and, like a balky mule, you can't make it go where it doesn't want to go.”
Source: Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language
“Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.”
“Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art.”
“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”
Source: Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual
“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”
“Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.”
Source: The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, Volume 10: 1934, Art as Experience
“Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.”
Source: Studies in Words
“Language expresses people's thinking and it was by a Word that God created the world and preserves it.”