Quotessence
Home / Topics / Language Quotes

Language Quotes

Browse 9447 quotes about Language.

Related topics

IfsPeopleSpeakThinkingWorldWayUseWritingKnowsMenEnglish LanguageHumansBookDifferentMeanFirstsCommunicationTryingWantArtShouldCultureNeedsKindMayFeelsFormIdeasMindWellsDoeTwoCountryChildrenLiteratureBodyHas BeensYearsImportantGivingFeelingsHeartSaidUsedCommonStoriesFactsLittlesWrittenSpeechMadeStillsUniversalForeign LanguageLongLooksMusic IsSoulPersonsBelieveSometimesSoundI CanMatterRealityPoetTongueCommunicateRealReasonSeemsWholeUnderstandingWould BeAbleTermNamesTranslationsSilenceProblemProgrammingEnoughSentencesStatesExpressionEndsTogetherAgeOrderPlayCharacterDifficultCertainMathematicsPoliticalCoursesHelpingNaturalReadingBody Languagemore

Language Quotes

“It has unfortunately now become a habit for so many generations, that it has almost passed into an instinct throughout the Jewish body, to rely upon the weapon of secrecy. Secret societies, a language kept as far as possible secret, the use of false names in order to hide secret movements, secret relations between various parts of the Jewish body: all these and other forms of secrecy have become the national method.”

UseBodyFormOrderNamesLanguageSecretGenerationsMovementHabitWeaponsRelationMethodInstinctJewVariousRelySecrecyRely UponSecret Society
Book:Belloc: A Biographical Anthology
Create image

“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.”

WayHumansSchoolOrderLanguageMovementReturnFoundationInnocenceLiberationRevolutionaryPoetry IsRenewalSurrealismPact
Book:Alternating Current
Create image

“We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.”

MenWayNeedsShouldMindHumansMayUseOrderLanguageRealizingConsciousnessStudyToo MuchPlanetsSeriousToolsStriveStartingDefinitionsWorthySeedsVersionsDataStreamsAssumptionOrganismsGraspingInterpretingHuman Language
Book:Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind
Create image

“I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky ... by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man.”

MenWayOrderReadingLanguageSocialPlansAmountConstantPrisonMemoirRangeImpressedApostlesSocial OrderTrotsky
Author:Dorothy Day
Create image

“Childhood is analogous to language learning. It has a biological basis but cannot be realized unless a social environment triggers and nurtures it, that is, has need of it. If a culture is dominated by a medium that requires the segregation of the young in order that they learn unnatural, specialized, and complex skills and attitudes, then childhood, in one form or another, will emerge, articulate and indispensable.”

IfsNeedsFormYoungOrderCultureLanguageSocialAttitudeEnvironmentChildhoodSkillsBasesComplexesMediumsNurtureIndispensableSegregationTriggersUnnaturalLanguage LearningSocial Environment
Author:Neil Postman
Create image

“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
Create image

“If children had teachers for judgment and eloquence just as they have for languages, if their memory was exercised less than their energy or their natural genius, if instead of deadening their vivacity of mind we tried to elevate the free scope and impulse of their souls, what might not result from a fine disposition? As it is, we forget that courage, or love of truth and glory are the virtues that matter most in youth; and our one endeavour is to subdue our children's spirits, in order to teach them that dependence and suppleness are the first laws of success in life.”

IfsMindFirstsChildrenSoulMatterMightLawSpiritOrderEnergyLanguageNaturalMemoriesForgetResultsTeachVirtueTeacherYouthFineGeniusJudgmentGloryOur ChildrenImpulseSuccess In LifeDependenceDispositionScopeEloquenceEndeavourVivacity
Author:Luc de Clapiers
Create image

“The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.”

RealityOrderLanguageHeardConceptsInjusticeMetaphysicsMetaphysicalPowerlessBetrayedDeprivedNeutralityImpartiality
Book:Dialectic of Enlightenment
Create image

“The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.”

ThinkingShouldBookAbleLyingOrderLanguageSidesExpressionLimitsShould HaveAimNonsenseBoth SidesThinkable
Book:Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Create image

“Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.”

IfsThinkingWritingMindHumansMadeHardUseHandsPastOrderLanguageGrowsSleepForgetTelevisionCommunicationSucceedDrawsMouthsConceptsTestsSilentFingersMediumsCompareHuman MindCompelledInabilityPointingShrinksSelectTransportUse Of Language
Book:Film as Art
Create image

“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
Create image

“The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept." is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble.”

MeanChildrenArtBookKidsOrderFightingCoursesReadingLiteratureLanguageChallengesLevelsRoomsAttentionTroubleDisciplineOfficeStuckBackgroundsAgencyAcademicCopSupportiveFilesCivicsInterpersonalDelinquentsInterpersonal RelationshipLanguage Arts
Book:Up the Down Staircase
Create image

“Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.”

WaySelfSongOrderLanguageSoundMusicHeardCreaturesCapableConsciousSelf ConsciousNightingales
Book:Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation
Create image

“The absurdist is concerned with the search for meaning in the Universe. He believes this search to be meaningless--hence the disintegration of plot, character, and language in absurdist drama. Order is a falsehood that we, God, those who came before us, have imposed on a random universe. However, the absurdist is confronted with a curious paradox: though he believes the Universe to be meaningless, he cannot abandon the search for meaning--or he will die.”

BelieveCharacterOrderDiesUniverseLanguageDramaConcernedCuriousPlotAbandonParadoxMeaninglessFalsehoodSearch For MeaningDisintegrationThose Who Came Before Us
Author:Walter Wykes
Create image

“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.”

KindMeanDifferentFactsRememberOrderLanguageDifferencesViewsPsychologyCenturyTypePerceptionPsychologicalFacultySensationsMechanismDifferent KindsImpressedRespectableCognitionDubiousHanging AroundVolition
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image

“Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.”

ArtWholeFormLawPoetryOrderLiteratureLanguageExistenceBreakDefinitionsGenreManifestationOppositionRepresentationDiscourseAdaptedAffirming
Book:The Order of Things
Create image

“I have issued the command, and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad, that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death's-head formation in readiness, for the present only in the East, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

MenNeedsChildrenDoeWarTodayRememberCertainTimeOrderSpeakLanguageLinesSpaceCompassionEnemyGainsCriticismDestructionMercyAimEastCommandReachingGenocideOne WordPolishMen WomenFormationReadinessAnnihilationFiringSquadArmeniansArmenian Genocide
Author:Adolf Hitler
Create image

“in order to confer their lost Nationality upon exiled Jews , the British with the help of the League of Nations began to rehabilitate the old Hebrew country, Palestine, with its long lost children. The Jews had maintained their race, religion, culture and language; and all they wanted was their natural territory to complete their Nationality. The reconstruction of the Hebrew Nation on Palestine is just an affirmation of the fact that Country, Race, Religion, Culture and Language must exist unequivocally together to form the Nation idea.”

ChildrenLongIdeasCountryFactsHelpingWantedTogetherFormOrderCultureLostLanguageNationsNaturalRaceJewBritishLeagueTerritoryAffirmationPalestineNationalityHebrewReconstructionLeague Of NationsCulture And LanguageLost Child
Author:M. S. Golwalkar
Create image

“The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.”

MayPlayOrderLanguageSoundPoorMusicMusicianNotesNeighborToneStringsMasteryConventionalNormViolinIntervalsRenderingViolinistDiscrete
Author:Willard Van Orman Quine
Create image