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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo; And now my tongue's use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony.”

KnowsYearsUseHandsLanguageHarmonyInstrumentsTongueNativeTunesFortyCunningHarps
Book:Second Tetralogy In Plain and Simple English: Includes Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V
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“The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.”

IfsFirstsUseUsedLanguageGrowsInnovationFollowingRecognizingDictionaryUnfamiliarDiscerningNew WordsLexicographer
Book:The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
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“Evolution is a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen's use of language, it's a fact, .. Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both those are also theories, but they're theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved.”

FactsUseEarthLanguageTermSunSpecialTheoryEvolutionOrdinaryPhilosophicalRoundsFlatsLaymanUse Of Language
Author:Richard Dawkins
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“Some tribes [of monkeys] have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behavior with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a diving commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy.”

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Author:Arthur Koestler
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“Would I describe a preacher, I would express him simple, grave, sincere; In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain, And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste, And natural in gesture; much impress'd Himself, as conscious of his awful charge, And anxious mainly that the flock he feeds May feel it too; affectionate in look, And tender in address, as well becomes A messenger of grace to guilty men.”

MenFeelsWellsLooksMayLanguageNaturalSimpleGraceConsciousGravesDoctrineGuiltyAwfulDecentAddressesSincereAnxiousGesturesPreacherPreachingImpressSolemnFlocksMessengersAffectionateChaste
Book:The Works of William Cowper: His Life, Letters, and Poems. Now First Completed by the Introduction of Cowper's Private Correspondence
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“I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.”

WayWritingFeelingsLanguageProgressPossibilityRelationMysteriousMy WayDevelopingJungle
Author:William Stafford
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“Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.”

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Book:The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals, and Religion, Selected from the Works of John Ruskin
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“All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny implicit in obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down - will perhaps forever be the language addressed to youth by age.”

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Book:The enquirer. Reflections on education, manners, and literature. In a series of essays
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“Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.”

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Book:Alternating Current
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