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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“If Zen is approached with the usual mental attitude, it will seem quite incomprehensible. Our average Western intellectuality would consider its paradoxical language simply as a play upon words. Its full significance is revealed only when we approach it in a different manner, making our minds available to the new processes of inner perception which it suggests.”

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Book:Living Zen
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“The sign work of the Orient it runneth up and down; The Talmud stalks from right to left, a rabbi in a gown; The Roman rolls from left to right from Maytime unto May; But the gods shake up their symbols in an absent-minded way. Their language runs to circles like the language of the eyes, Emphasised by strange dilations with little panting sighs.”

WayMayLittlesEyeRunningLeftLanguageStrangeCirclesSymbolsShakesSighUp And DownAbsentStalkingGownsRabbiAbsent Minded
Book:The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems
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“Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a 'ruling thought'. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, ... for language itself is a network of 'fixed ideas'. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually.”

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Book:Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky
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“Every time another tribe becomes extinct and their language dies, another way of life and another way of understanding the world disappears forever. Even if it has been painstakingly studied and recorded, a language without a people to speak - it means little. A language can only live if its people live, and if today's uncontacted tribes are to have a future, we must respect their right to choose their own way of life.”

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Author:Stephen Corry
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“Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.”

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Author:Alain Finkielkraut
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“Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.”

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Author:Jerry Fodor
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“Over the years, I have become convinced that Hellenism as a culture represents not a static condition of uniform sublimity mysteriously achieved and maintained as an effect of some racial advantage. Rather it should be understood as an evolving process, governed by a dynamic of change, as both language and thought underwent transformational alteration caused by a transition from orality to literacy. The instrument of change is discerned to be the invention of the Greek alphabet, at a quite late stage in the history of developing cultures.”

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Author:Eric A. Havelock
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“Although mathematical notation undoubtedly possesses parsing rules, they are rather loose, sometimes contradictory, and seldom clearly stated. [...] The proliferation of programming languages shows no more uniformity than mathematics. Nevertheless, programming languages do bring a different perspective. [...] Because of their application to a broad range of topics, their strict grammar, and their strict interpretation, programming languages can provide new insights into mathematical notation.”

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Author:Kenneth E. Iverson
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“Seldom can two such epoch-making events have occurred in successive years as happened then. In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz.”

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Author:Frederic G. Kenyon
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“It will be, I suppose, a foolhardy Government that tries to push through legislation making knowledge of both official languages one of the qualifications for election to the House of Commons or appointment to the Senate, but maybe it will have to come to this as a price we must pay for equality of the two great language groups of our founding fathers.”

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Author:Judy LaMarsh
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“We have a word game in English called "Twenty questions." To play Twenty Questions, one player imagines some object, and the other players must guess what it is by asking questions that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no." I imagine every language has a similar game, and, for those of us who speak the language of science, the game is called The Scientific Method.”

PlayGamesSpeakLanguageImaginePlayerObjectsTwentiesAskingMethodAsking QuestionsScientific Method
Author:Karl Barry Sharpless
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“Brian Turner writes as only a soldier can, of terror and compassion, hurt and horror, sympathy and desire. He takes us into the truth and trauma of the Iraq war in language that is precise, delicate and beautiful, even as it tells of a suicide bomber, a skull shattered by a bullet, a blade in a bloodgroove.”

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Author:Andrew Himes
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“Many strange-looking people obviously dress according to deep convictions that are not shared by on-lookers - they clearly do not know how they actually look, but are satisfied with what their clothes make them feel and believe about their looks. These people may be the true originals, even though they are certainly not the best appreciated. The famous messages of dress, the well-known language of clothes, is very often not doing any communicating at all; a good deal of it is a form of private muttering.”

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Book:Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress
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“[What I want to communicate] doesn't have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts - understanding. But I don't really have a major message that I want to bring to the world through my music. The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It's not my information, it's not mine. I didn't make it. I just discovered it.”

PeopleKnowsWorldWantNeedsHumansI CanSelfLanguageUnderstandingHuman BeingsInformationEmotionalMinesMajorsMessagesIntellectualCommunicateBeing HumanEvidentEmotional Things
Author:Jeff Buckley
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