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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With 'How to Save a Life', I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.”

Has BeensBookCountrySeemsLanguageProcessInvolvedVariousContactEditorsImaginaryOther CountriesPublishersPublicityDisconnectedSave A Life
Author:Sara Zarr
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“There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.”

HumansSometimesSeemsEarthLiteratureLanguagePrinciplesTreeHuman NatureRootsFoundationPlantMereCurrentsSurfaceProofPreservesStreamsSoilWeedRootedNow And ThenWorthlessUnchangingSwept AwayDeep RootsMutability
Book:The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – The Complete Collection: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Voyage, Roscoe, A Royal Poet, A Sunday in London and many more (Illustrated)
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“People only speak to get something. If I say, Let me tell you a few things about myself, already your defenses go up; you go, Look, I wonder what he wants from me, because no one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That's the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it's just coincidence, because what they're trying to do is accomplish an objective.”

PeopleIfsWantTryingLooksMayReasonUseSeemsSpeakLanguageWonderMouthsLet MeAccomplishDefenseObjectivesCoincidenceRevealing
Author:David Mamet
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“The usage of the words "public" and "public sphere" betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.”

StatesSeemsLanguageSocialConditionsHistoricalVariousEmploymentWelfareConfusedSpheresBetrayPhasesBourgeoisInappropriateMultiplicityUsageWelfare StateFuseCloudedSocial Welfare
Author:Jurgen Habermas
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“It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.”

WantBelieveSaidStatesSeemsLanguageAnimalDoorsDogMastersTheoryBabySpeechOrdinaryPhilosophicalObviousDenyMilkInfant
Author:John Searle
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“What does purpose mean? It means the deepest desire for our short lives to mean something. . . . To speak a language of purpose is to return to first principles and to be able to answer, in plain English, the plain questions of Why? Why should we chip in to help someone else? Why should we defer gratification? Why should we care about the long term? Why should we trust anyone who seems to be limiting our ability to do what we want?”

WantShouldFirstsMeanLongDoeHelpingSeemsCareAbleDesirePurposeSpeakLanguageTermAbilityAnswersPrinciplesReturnIntentionLong TermChipsGratificationShort LifePlain English
Author:Eric Liu
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“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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“It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.”

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Author:Toni Morrison
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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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“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.”

IfsKnowsWayChildrenUseHomeSeemsLyingLanguageSilenceCryPoliticianPromiseModelsEverydayNinePresidentialCandidatesAccuracyDisneylandWednesdayPresidential CandidateWorkmenArtisansRectitudeFalse Promises
Author:Mary McGrory
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“I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.”

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Author:Salman Rushdie
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“New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding - great uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only seems flat, the sun only seems to circle the earth, matter only seems solid.”

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Book:The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s
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“Some feminist critics debate whether we take our meaning and sense of self from language and in that process become phallocentric ourselves, or if there is a use of language that is, or can be, feminine. Some, like myself, think that language is itself neither male nor female; it is creatively expansive enough to be of use to those who have the wit and art to wrest from it their own significance. Even the dread patriarchs have not found a way to 'own' language any more than they have found a way to 'own' earth (though many seem to believe that both are possible).”

IfsThinkingWayBelieveArtSelfEnoughUseSeemsEarthFoundLanguageProcessFemaleCriticsMalesFeministWitDebateSignificanceFeminineDreadSense Of SelfUse Of Language
Book:Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-busting Border-crossing Loose Canons
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“The omission of an expected conjunction is called an asyndeton. Caesar is supposed to have said about Gaul: I came, I saw, I conquered. Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address, That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.Caesar seems to have omitted his conjunction to speed things up; he is emphasizing how quickly the conquest of a place follows from its being sighted by a great and ambitious general. Lincoln's omission is more subtle”

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Book:Figures of Speech: 60 Ways To Turn A Phrase
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“Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.”

MenMayMeanSeemsBeautifulLanguageGivenExpressionHabitDiversityLogicConstitutionFoolishHeatNativeConstructionPatriotConvenientNative Language
Author:George Santayana
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“... fain would I turn back the clock and devote to French or some other language the hours I spent upon algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, of which not one principle remains with me. Stay! There is one theorem painfully drummed into my head which seems to have inhabited some corner of my brain since that early time: "The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides!" There it sticks, but what of it, ye gods, what of it?”

TwoSeemsTurnsLanguageSidesHoursBrainPrinciplesEqualMathematicsRemainsSticksCornersClockSquaresGeometryTwo SidesAlgebraTheoremsTrianglesTrigonometry
Author:Jessie Belle Rittenhouse
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“Is it not possible that the chimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe? A feeling generated by the mystery of water; water that seems alive, always rushing past yet never going, always the same yet ever different. Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of the elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control? Only when our prehistoric ancestors developed language would it have been possible to discuss such internal feelings and create a shared religion.”

FirstsHas BeensDifferentFeelingsSeemsPastLanguageWaterAliveMysteryElementsWorshipAweInternalsAncestorRespondingRushingChimpanzeesPrehistoricMystery Of Nature
Author:Jane Goodall
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