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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“I am committed to writing appropriate books for the middle grades. This means no bad language, no gratuitous or explicit violence, and no sexual content beyond what you might find in a PG-rated movie – expressions of who likes whom, holding hands, and perhaps the occasional kiss. The idea that we should treat sexual orientation itself as an adults-only topic, however, is absurd. Non-heterosexual children exist. To pretend they do not, to fail to recognize that they have needs for support and validation like any child, would be bad teaching, bad writing, and bad citizenship.”

NeedsShouldWritingMeanChildrenBookIdeasHandsMightWould BeLanguageSupportViolenceFailingTeachingMiddleExpressionKissingAdultsTreatsCommittedLikesAbsurdGradesAppropriateCitizenshipTopicsOccasionalOrientationValidationExplicitHolding HandsBad WritingBad Language
Author:Rick Riordan
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“Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.”

ThinkingWayGivingFeelsWritingTryingMindHeartHas BeensIdeasRealityAbleLanguageTiesReceivingDivorcedContradictory
Author:Eduardo Galeano
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“Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds, say, engineering and business, you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life.”

WorldWayTwoIdeasTogetherMovingSpeakLanguageSexCreativeOne ThingMastersBabyElementsAdvantageWake UpHotInsightSparksEngineeringIntroducingTribesChanging Your LifeEpiphanyTwo WorldsCompetitive Advantage
Author:Justine Musk
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“We sift reality through screens composed of ideas . (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language , by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.”

IfsWayIdeasRealityMovingFormLawOrderLanguageStepsCuttingRootsScreensOur ThoughtsValidityGroove
Author:Frank Herbert
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“A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.”

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Author:Toni Morrison
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“This book reminds me of James Gleick's Chaos. The ideas and stories in Loving and Hating Mathematics are timely, interesting, and sometimes even profound. The authors, writing for nonspecialists, take pains to explain technical ideas in nontechnical language, and the book should interest general readers as well as a large mathematical audience.”

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Author:Steven G. Krantz
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“How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.”

IdeasHandsEyeRememberSpeakLanguageForceLosesSimpleRoomsDoorsInstrumentsSurpriseFingersLipsShouldersOpeningPerceivePhrasesTranslationsEyebrowsWhisperingExpressiveHindranceSimple Ideas
Book:Essays: Moral, Political and Aesthetic
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“The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet, I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world.”

IfsThinkingWorldWayHumansHas BeensIdeasDifferentOrderLanguageWaterHalfCasesRightsMereHuman RightsMeaningfulErasDifferent WaysFloatingSlogansDifferent PlaceWorld OrderRights And FreedomsDeparting
Author:Vaclav Havel
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“The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world. The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see.”

WorldWayStillsTwoIdeasHumanityLanguageStarsUnderstandingViewsWestNotionAvailableStoresChineseImmortalityTwo WaysExplodingCrabsUnderstanding The WorldNebula
Book:Great Ideas in Physics
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“I don't particularly care about having [my characters] talk realistically, that doesn't mean very much to me. Actually, a lot of people speak more articulately than some critics think, but before the 20th century it really didn't occur to many writers that their language had to be the language of everyday speech. When Wordsworth first considered that in poetry, it was considered very much of a shocker. And although I'm delighted to have things in ordinary speech, it's not what I'm trying to perform myself at all: I want my characters to get their ideas across, and I want them to be articulate.”

PeopleThinkingWantWritingTryingFirstsMeanIdeasCharacterCareSpeakLanguageCenturySpeechOrdinaryCriticsEveryday20th CenturyDelightedWordsworth
Author:Louis Auchincloss
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“The sole constitutional office of language being to express our ideas and sentiments, it becomes more and more perfect and useful, the more effectually it subserves this sole end of its creation.”

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Book:Memory and intellectual improvement applied to self-education and juvenile instruction ... Twenty-fifth edition, improved
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“We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.”

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Author:Niels Bohr
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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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“The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind”

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Author:Terence McKenna
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“He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.”

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Author:Washington Irving
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“The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules.”

PeopleIdeasLanguageCommunicateAcceptedSillyMannersCodeBehaveArtificialEtiquetteSpoken Language
Book:Common courtesy: in which Miss Manners solves the problem that baffled Mr. Jefferson
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“Like language, a code of manners can be used with more or less skill, for laudable or for evil purposes, to express a great variety of ideas and emotions. In itself, it carries no moral value, but ignorance in use of this tool is not a sign of virtue.”

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Book:Common courtesy: in which Miss Manners solves the problem that baffled Mr. Jefferson
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“Political correctness is a concept invented by hard-rightwing forces to defend their right to be racist, to treat women in a degrading way and to be truly vile about gay people. They invent this idea of people who are politically correct, with a rigid, monstrous attitude to life so they can attack. But we have all had to learn to modify our language. That's all part of being a decent human being.”

PeopleWayHumansIdeasHardPoliticalLanguageForceHuman BeingsAttitudeGayConceptsTreatsDecentRacistMonstrousPolitical CorrectnessGay PeopleCorrectnessPolitically CorrectDegrading
Author:Clare Short
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“What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast.”

IdeasFactsSongDiesLanguageEasyMoralJokesReflectionWitCharacteristicsLatterSentimentsContrastAphorismPreciseSonnetEpigramsManageable
Author:William Matthews
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“I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.”

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Author:George Saunders
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“Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.”

IdeasLanguageInterestGoldMathematicsLaysWestPhysicsSatisfiedClarityChemistryTypicalMagicianAlchemistTheoremsDensCharlatansIgnobleEuclid
Author:Primo Levi
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“Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts. It’s hard to think this way — I see it in other people’s body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I don’t even care if it’s going to work, I can’t take more change. O.K., Google, O.K., Twitter—but Airbnb? People staying in each other’s houses without there being a lot of axe murders?”

PeopleIfsThinkingWayFeelsLooksI CanIdeasSometimesHardBodyCareHouseLanguageMy OwnCrazyMurderStayingNutsGoogleGoing To WorkBreakthroughBody LanguageAirbnb
Author:Marc Andreessen
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