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English Language Quotes

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English Language Quotes

“When we start making distinctions between soul and spirit, we're in very, very murky waters. There is the whole issue of the English language, which has a rather limited vocabulary when it comes to psychological descriptions, not to speak of spiritual descriptions. We're good mythically - the English language is superb for myth. But we're not very good for psychology or spirituality.”

SoulWholeSpiritualSpiritSpiritualitySpeakLanguageWaterIssuesPsychologyVery GoodMythPsychologicalDistinctionDescriptionVocabularyEnglish LanguageSuperbMurky Water
Author:Jean Houston
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“It took a pretty drastic moment to shift my thinking towards visual arts. I got to a moment in my writing career when I wasn't trusting the language, I was really not trusting the written language, the English language. How do you work with a material that you don't have trust in? I had to step away from it and find another way of articulating and I had to do it without words.”

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Author:Truong Tran
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“I'm a champion for western civilization and, yes, our English language is a big part of it. It's a carrier of freedom. Wherever the English language has gone globally, freedom went with it. Science technology has always lifted up the standard of living on average of everybody on the planet. I want more of that, not less. There are civilizations that produce very little, if any. This western civilization is a superior civilization, and we want to share it with everybody.”

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Author:Steve King
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“I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a good reader, I'm a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father's love of Swinburn, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on - not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn't understand it, but I felt it.”

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Author:Jorge Luis Borges
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“I work in Hebrew. Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages. Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English. The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages. Every language has influences and is an influence.”

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Author:Amos Oz
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“The revival of Hebrew, as a spoken language, is a fascinating story, which I'm afraid I cannot squeeze into a few sentences. But, let me give you a clue. Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.”

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Author:Amos Oz
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“I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.”

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Author:Bob Garfield
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“We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.”

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Book:An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: An analysis of Mr. Locke's Doctrine of ideas .... A defense of Mr. Locke's Opinion concerning personal identity .... A treatise on the conduct of the understanding. Some thoughts concerning reading and study for a gentleman. Elements of natural philosophy. A new method of a common place book. Extracted from the author's works. With a life of the author
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“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

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Author:Nelson Mandela
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“Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.”

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Book:Fruits of Solitude: In Reflections and Maxims Relating to the Conduct of Human Life
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“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

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Author:Ronald Reagan
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“My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.”

GivingLittlesFactsHelpingLyingValuesLanguageAnswersGraceExpressionInterviewsOppositionDeclineEnglish LanguageGive And Take
Book:Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself
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“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

InspirationalKindWisdomReligionLanguageInspiringKindnessNiceRelationshipSeeingPositiveGratitudeGoodnessBlindCharityAppreciationHearingThanksBe KindWarmthAutismBeing NiceThank YouBlindnessThankfulDeafBeing ThankfulEnglish LanguageBenevolenceExpress YourselfGoodwillLove And KindnessKindness And CompassionSaying Thank YouActs Of KindnessLoving KindnessExpressing GratitudeFundraisingHumannessThank You GratitudeGoodness And KindnessInspirational KindnessRandom Acts Of KindnessGenerosity And KindnessKindness GenerosityThankful For YouWords Of KindnessNicenessExpress AppreciationHuman KindnessGratitude For HelpCommon LanguagePeople With DisabilitiesActs Of CharityRandom KindnessThanks YouLanguages CommunicationCulture And LanguageSurround Yourself With Good PeopleKind ThoughtsImportant DaysRepayingSimple Acts Of KindnessThank You LoveThanking FriendsDeaf And DumbDeaf And BlindKindness And PatienceThankful For Family
Book:Bite-Size Twain: Wit and Wisdom from the Literary Legend
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“Words fail me sometimes. I have read most every word in the Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language, but I still have trouble making them come when I want them to. Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get – a cold sick feeling deep down inside – when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know you will never be the same again.”

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Book:A Gathering Light
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“That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.”

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Author:W. H. Auden
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“Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.”

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Book:The Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of
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