Best language & knows Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.”

Ifs Knows Giving Should Language Break Audience Creative Heard Effects Poet Standards Busy Deliberate Barbarians Usage Lapses Slang Buffoons Breaking Rules

Author:N.D. Wilson

“I'm an infant with Shakespeare; I'm kind of learning how to walk. I am trying to decipher the code, you know? I do my research. And I get a clear understanding of what the language is. It is a tremendous process I have to go through as I am sure all actors do, finding the gems hidden in his language.”

Knows Trying Kind Actors Language Process Understanding Walks Clear Findings Research Code Infant Gems Decipher

Author:Ruben Santiago-Hudson

“Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate. That is why it is a complete misinterpretation to apply to the Church the words 'Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.' Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty, or ten. He said two or three.”

Source: Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)

“Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.”

Source: Steering the craft: exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew

“Anyone who has undergone home repair lately knows that your everyday artisan uses language so loosely and makes false promises so glibly as to make your politicians, even the presidential candidate, seem like a model of accuracy and rectitude. 'Be there Wednesday at nine,' the workman will tell you. It is a lie. He is humoring you. He says it to silence you, the way you tell a child you will take it to Disneyland if it will stop crying.”

“I gravitate toward the larger worldview questions such as, Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? What does it mean to know another person? To love someone? Of course, those questions are sort of in the background as I'm playing with language in the foreground, but those are the informing questions.”

Knows Mean Persons Doe Courses Language Backgrounds Supposed To Be Love Someone Worldview Informing Foreground

Author:Aaron Belz

“It consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of language.”

Knows Way Language Wit Fancy Inexplicable Roving

Book:The Theological Works of Isaac Barrow

Source: The Theological Works of Isaac Barrow

“enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.”

Knows Soul God Earth Language Answers Tree Dumb Our Relationship Responding Unspoken Magnificence Unwritten

Book:Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr

Source: Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr

“There are some words I find impossibly difficult ... 'Love,' 'feeling' and especially 'happiness' are at the head of the list. This is not because I haven't experienced any of them but because whenever I think about using the words I don't really know what anyone means by them. I'd find it easier to sit down and write a book about each (coming, obviously, to no conclusion) than to use them casually in speech or writing.”

Thinking Knows Writing Mean Book Use Feelings Language Difficult Havens Easier Speech Down And Lists Conclusion Love Feeling

Author:Jenny Diski

“I try to write each piece in the language of the piece, so that I'm not using the same language from piece to piece. I may be using ten or twenty languages. That multiplicity of language and the use of words is African in tradition. And black writers have definitely taken that up and taken it in. It's like speaking in tongues. It may sound like gibberish to somebody, but you know it's a tongue of some kind. Black people have this. We have the ability as a race to speak in tongues, to dream in tongues, to love in tongues.”

People Knows Writing Trying Kind May Use Dream Speak Language Sound Black Ability Race Taken Pieces Ten Tradition Twenties Tongue Black People Multiplicity Speaking In Tongues

Author:Alexis De Veaux

“Time in China has no immediacy as in America. Here I find the swift passage of our few earthly years accepted as naturally as the fall of flower and leaf. ... I hear and speak a language in which grammar has no tense. Both scholars and illiterates, in ordinary daily speech, tell an event of centuries ago as casually as an incident of the hour. Only as my knowledge has accumulated have I been able to know whether something related happened just then or in some past dynasty.”

Knows Years Able America Past Time Fall Speak Language Hours Happened Century Events Flower Speech Ordinary China Accepted Related Passages Scholar Leafs Grammar Incidents Tense Dynasty Immediacy

Author:Nora Waln

“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.”

Knows World Writing I Can Ideas Stories Language Challenges Know How Effects Love Story Celebrate Occasions Site Because I Can Brevity Story Writing

Author:George Saunders

“David Fincher is probably the best comprehensive director in terms of being a manger of a process that must drive forward. He has such confident command of cinema language and visual language and script and performance. He knows more about f-stops than any cameraman, he knows more about lighting than any gaffer, he is a wonderful writer, and he can give you a good line reading. Under pressure, he is the kind of guy who you will just dive in with and trust and follow because his vision is so intense.”

“I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.”

People Knows World Writing Matter Character Political Language Voice Grief No Matter What Structure Surprise Wounds Theme Surprise Me

Author:Barbara Kingsolver

“You know, I think there are certain words like 'illegitimate' that should not be used to describe a person. And certainly, we have come far enough in our technology that our language can evolve, because it has an impact.”

Thinking Knows Should Persons Enough Used Certain Language Technology Impact Evolve

Author:Aimee Mullins

“Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is moat thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy boat among miners; and so with everything else.”

Knows Country Language Wish Easy Study Teacher Teaching Breathe Boat Atmosphere Acquire Native Dominant Thorough Best Teacher Miners Moats

Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I can use movie as a language. Not only could it send a good message, I could let people know about my thinking and how I see the world, how I see the colour, how I see the music, how I see everything.”

People Thinking Knows World I Can Use Language Messages Colour

Author:John Woo

“I still don't feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can't separate one from the other.”

Knows Feels Looks Stills Language Darkness Remains Cinema Filmmaker Giants Admiration Elusive Cinematic Hitchcock

Author:Toby Jones

“I was always getting run-down from jet lag and being in strange towns where I didn't speak the language or know what the food was like.”

Knows Running Speak Language Strange Towns Jet Lag Jet Lag

Author:Molly Sims

“Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didnt even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.”

Knows Different Sometimes Character Language Answers Enjoyment Different Characters Different Languages

Author:Roger Federer

“Most Americans have parents or grandparents who immigrated to this country, and we know the hardships they faced, from learning the language to dealing with prejudice.”

Knows Country Language Parent Prejudice Hardship Grandparent

Author:Hank Johnson

“When you work as a day player on a film or a TV thing, like you're visiting a foreign country, where you know a couple of words of the language and a few of the cultural abnormalities, but basically you're a stranger in a strange land.”

Knows Country Film Language Player Land Strange Tvs Like You Couple Stranger Visiting Foreign Countries Abnormality Stranger In A Strange Land

Author:Anthony Heald

“I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.”

“Filmmaking materials are in the hands of more people now than ever before. I would like to think that the more people have these tools, the more people will learn how to use them, it's another argument I would argue for, personally, for art's education. Because there are kids who aren't that literate in screen language and they've got to know how people select shots, how people edit audio, how people combine things to make what they see on the screen. It would be like the 15th century or the 16th century in Germany, and somebody amends a printing press and you don't know how to read and write.”

“Every form of power comes down to language. In law, there's all kinds of words you don't know if you're not a lawyer and that gives them power. In business, it's the same thing.”

Ifs Knows Giving Kind Form Law Language Lawyer All Kinds In-laws

Author:Tony Robbins

“When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.”

Thinking Knows Men Children Ideas Beautiful Form Dies Speak Language Written Printed Inarticulate

Author:H. L. Mencken

“If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.”

Ifs Knows Use Language Share Bars Ease Over It Melody Bob Songwriters Dylan Possessing Woody Use Of Language

Author:John Mellencamp

“I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.”

Ifs Knows Home Language

Author:Mohsin Hamid

“Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. Thats half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language.”

People Ifs Knows Country Language Given Chance Half Land Willing Population Uncertainty Abandon Peru Foreign Lands

Author:Daniel Alarcon

“You know, I think music is very interactive. It's a - it's a language.”

Thinking Knows Language Music Is Interactive

Author:Jake Shimabukuro

“I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know.”

People Knows Way Feels Seems Language Charity Missions Doing Good

Book:Four Novels of George Eliot

Source: Four Novels of George Eliot

“If you don't know foreign languages, you don't know anything about your own.”

Ifs Knows Language Foreign Language

Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Command of English, spoken or written, ranks at the top in business. Our main product is words, so a knowledge of their meaning and spelling and pronunciation is imperative. If a man knows the language well, he can find out about all else.”

Ifs Knows Men Wells Language Written Products Command Imperatives Spelling Pronunciation

Author:William Feather

“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”

Knows Love Ideas Language Sound Known Seeing Locked Deceiving Incapable Preventing Impotence

Author:Marcel Proust

“I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!”

Knows Book School Language Results Class Boys Changed English Language Eighteen Private School

Book:Chips Off the Old Benchley

Source: Chips Off the Old Benchley

“Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun.”

Knows Names Language Futility

Author:Samuel Beckett

“There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.”

Knows Feels Has Beens Play Action Language Audience Player Stage Speech Our Time Phenomenon Frightening Incapable Symptoms Reliance Experimentation Fright Incapacity Stage Fright

Author:Muriel Rukeyser

“But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all theabstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called "Sympathetic Nature.”

Knows Writing Mind Art Use Form Language Term Numbers Know How Senses Civilized Vulgar Abstraction Mistress Sympathetic Refined Detached Corresponding Art Of Writing

Author:Giambattista Vico

“Without Christ, sciences in every department are vain....The man who knows not God is vain, though he should be conversant with every branch of learning. Nay more, we may affirm this too with truth, that these choice gifts of God -- expertness of mind, acuteness of judgment, liberal sciences, and acquaintance with languages, are in a manner profaned in every instance in which they fall to the lot of wicked men.”

“Feeling is the language of the soul. If you want to know what's true for you about something, look to how you're feeling about it.”

Ifs Knows Want Looks Soul Feelings Language Deepest Feelings

Book:Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue

Source: Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped the significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew--and I knew it was important to know--that Papa worked hard all day long.”

Knows Long Important Hard Facts Girl House Language Work Class Brother Members Dresses My Brother Significance Pants Working Class Papa

Book:The romance of American Communism

Source: The romance of American Communism

“If you want to know what's important to a culture, learn their language.”

Ifs Knows Want Important Culture Language What's Important

Author:Joanne Harris

“The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.”

“...words are some of the most powerful and important things I know....Language is the tool of love and the weapon of hatred. It's the bright red warning flag of danger--and the stone foundation of diplomacy and peace.”

Knows Important Language Powerful Danger Weapons Red Tools Stones Hatred Foundation Important Things Most Powerful Warning Flags Diplomacy

Author:Ani DiFranco

“Next, 'real' is what we may call a trouser-word. It is usually thought, and I dare say usually rightly thought, that what one might call the affirmative use of a term is basic--that, to understand 'x,' we need to know what it is to be x, or to be an x, and that knowing this apprises us of what it is not to be x, not to be an x. But with 'real' (as we briefly noted earlier) it is the negative use that wears the trousers.”

Knows Needs May Real Use Might Next Language Term Knowing Negative Dare Affirmative Trousers

Author:J. L. Austin

“I am not of the opinion generally entertained in this country [England], that man lives by Greek and Latin alone; that is, by knowing a great many words of two dead languages, which nobody living knows perfectly, and which are of no use in the common intercourse of life. Useful knowledge, in my opinion, consists of modern languages, history, and geography; some Latin may be thrown into the bargain, in compliance with custom, and for closet amusement.”

“Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

“All too often, when people don't know where they are, have jet lag, don't speak the language, and can't figure out the money or maintain intestinal regularity, they get hostile.”

People Knows Speak Language Figures Travel Hostile Jet Regularity Lag Jet Lag

Book:Traveling While Married

Source: Traveling While Married

“Many dogs can understand almost every word humans say, while humans seldom learn to recognize more than half a dozen barks, if that. And barks are only a small part of the dog language. A wagging tail can mean so many things. Humans know that it means a dog is pleased, but not what a dog is saying about his pleasedness.”

Ifs Knows Humans Mean Language Half Dog Communicate Dozen Tails Bark Small Parts

Book:101 Dalmatians

Source: 101 Dalmatians

“I don't know what is stronger or what is weaker.The whole language of strength and weaknesses is irrelevant,because when you use arms you do not use ballots, and public opinion is unimportant, and they shoot at their opponents.”

Knows Whole Use Language Opinion Arms Weakness Stronger Opponents Irrelevant Public Opinion Unimportant Ballots Strength And Weakness

Author:Shimon Peres

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Language Quotes