Best Quotes About Language (Top 100)
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War is what happens when language fails.
Margaret Atwood
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
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Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain
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I want to understand you, I study your obscure language.
Alexander Pushkin
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Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
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Music is the universal language of mankind.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
Roland Barthes
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Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body.
Martha Graham
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Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Edgar Allan Poe
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If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Nelson Mandela
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That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them.
Dorothy Parker
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Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin
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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Thomas Hardy
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Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran
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The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Henry David Thoreau
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Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.
Keith Richards
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To have another language is to possess a second soul.
Charlemagne
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Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich
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It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
Carl Sagan
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Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I am is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that I do is the longest sentence?
George Carlin
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Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.
Meister Eckhart
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I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
Jane Wagner
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Language is a virus from outer space.
William S. Burroughs
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A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
William Arthur Ward
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It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
Anthony Doerr
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We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.
Jerome Bruner
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Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.
Stevie Wonder
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...language is never innocent.
Roland Barthes
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Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
Martin Heidegger
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"Cheque enclosed" are the two most beautiful words in the English language
Dorothy Parker
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Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
Anthony Burgess
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We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Toni Morrison
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The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo Calvino
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We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
Tom Stoppard
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
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Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
Robert Benchley
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Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.
Jimmy Carter
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Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
Ferdinand de Saussure
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Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
Jean Baudrillard
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French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
Stephen King
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If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
Rita Mae Brown
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Scientific research and other studies have demonstrated that arts education can enhance American students' math and language skills and improve test scores which in turn increase chances of higher education and good jobs in the future.
Thad Cochran
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Joseph Brodsky
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I speak only one language, and it is not my own.
Jacques Derrida
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I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.
Katherine Dunn
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A different language is a different vision of life.
Federico Fellini
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The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
Jacques Derrida
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To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
Roland Barthes
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Music begins where the possibilities of language end.
Jean Sibelius
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Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Average. It was the worst, most disgusting word in the English language. Nothing meaningful or worthwhile ever came from that word.
Portia de Rossi
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The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them
Stephen King
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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Derek Walcott
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Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats
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Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law
Ferdinand de Saussure
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In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
Jacques Lacan
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They took away our land, our language, and our religion; but they could never harness our tongues...
Brendan Behan
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This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.
Stanley Fish
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Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.
Elfriede Jelinek
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We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
William Saroyan
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Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
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We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
Joyce Carol Oates
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By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
George Carlin
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England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
George Bernard Shaw
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Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.
Alan Moore
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Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.
Aphra Behn
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Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.
Eric Bentley
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… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…
Derek Walcott
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When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
John Donne
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Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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A riot is the language of the unheard.
Martin Luther King Jr.
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Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Lucille Clifton
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Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
Jeff Daly
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Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
Angela Carter
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Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.
Rita Mae Brown
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My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets âno, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Philip Roth
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We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.
Buck Henry
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One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.
Caroline Kennedy
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If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
Jean Baudrillard
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Silence is the only language god speaks.
Charles Simic
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Language has not the power to
speak what love indites:
The soul lies buried
in the ink that writes.
John Clare
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My cat speaks sign language with her tail.
Robert A. M. Stern
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Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
Roland Barthes
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Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.
Judith Wright
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Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.
Ben Jonson
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When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.
Alan Perlis
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Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder
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whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
Mark Twain
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To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
Joseph Conrad
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My language is the sum total of myself.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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english doesn't borrow from other languages. english follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
James Nicoll
Even More Language Quotes
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Tears are the silent language of grief.
Voltaire
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If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.
Doug Larson
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Language is wine upon the lips.
Virginia Woolf
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Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.
Walt Disney
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High thoughts must have high language.
Aristophanes
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If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one's drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one's language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.
Joseph Brodsky
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The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
Donald Knuth
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The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.
Eugene Wigner
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It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.
Franklin P. Jones
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Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
Marshall McLuhan
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If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.
John Jay Chapman
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There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
Northrop Frye
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Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.
Walt Disney
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One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
Denise Levertov
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Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
George Steiner
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The Catholic faith never changes. But the language and mode of manifesting this one faith can change according to peoples, times and places.
Francis Arinze
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My first language was shy. It's only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.
Al Pacino
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Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit.
Jeremy Taylor
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When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
James Earl Jones
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
Alan Perlis
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All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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Conduct is more convincing than language.
John Woolman
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He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.
Guy Debord
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Smiles are the language of love.
David Hare
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I speak two languages, Body and English.
Mae West
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It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.
Andrei Codrescu
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How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
Jack Gilbert
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Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.
Paul Tillich
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Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
Federico Fellini
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Words performed through music can express what language alone had exhausted
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
Gaston Bachelard
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If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
Confucius
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Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
Cyril Connolly
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My least favorite phrase in the English language is 'I don't care.'
James Caan
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The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Eric Hoffer
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Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death.
Heinrich Heine
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Talk to people in their own language. If you do it well, they'll say, 'God, he said exactly what I was thinking.' And when they begin to respect you, they'll follow you to the death.
Lee Iacocca
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Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
Larry Wall
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Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.
Carol Shields
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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Italo Calvino
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Translation is the art of failure.
Umberto Eco
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No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.
Fisher Ames
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Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.
Blaise Pascal
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Latin is already a dead language, man... don't make it any deader.
Jerry Scott
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When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, sir, was the primary object.
Patrick Henry
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I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested in.
Buddy Holly
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The chief merit of language is clearness.
Galen
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He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence " of talking without meaning " is never effaced.
Henry Adams
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Body language is essential for an actress, even if you don't use your body in an athletic way. Just to be free, to use it like your voice. A body can be small and have incredible violence. A body talks.
Anne Parillaud
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Mathematics is as little a science as grammar is a language.
Ernst Mayr
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No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
Aubrey Beardsley
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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
Antonin Artaud
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That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.
Siri Hustvedt
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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
Aldous Huxley
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Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
Leonard Cohen
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The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.
Vincent Van Gogh
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Don't tell your friends about your indigestion. "How are you" is a greeting, not a question.
Arthur Guiterman
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Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
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Playing golf is like learning a foreign language.
Henry Longhurst
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We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch
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Let God be true but every man a liar' is the language of true faith.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
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What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.
Antonio Porchia
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Though language forms the preacher, 'Tis good works make the man.
Eliza Cook
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The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
Hippocrates
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Because Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands
Joy Harjo
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If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.
Heinrich Heine
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Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.
Joshua Reynolds
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You need to find somebody who will speak the same language. We understand that we couldn't have any kind of discussion without permission, without a legal framework behind it.
Anatoly Chubais
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Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.
Guy Davenport
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The repeal of racist language in the Constitution of Alabama was and still is a necessary step in the state's ability to progress.
Artur Davis
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Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.
Criss Jami
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To be an architect is to possess an individual voice speaking a generally understood language of form.
Robert A. M. Stern
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Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
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Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt.
Emma Lazarus
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Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages
Dave Barry
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Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.
Christian Morgenstern
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I do swear a lot, but the advantage is that having played abroad, I can choose a different language from the referee's.
Jurgen Klinsmann
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We can lie in the language of dress or try to tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.
Alison Lurie
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Language is memory and metaphor.
Storm Jameson
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Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
Alan Kay
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
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When a language creates - as it does - a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.
Christopher Ricks
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The poor girl does not know how to have a conversation. Unfortunately, she does know how to speak.
Winston Churchill
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The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.
Italo Calvino
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Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.
Casey Miller
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With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
Antonin Artaud
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The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
George Bernard Shaw
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A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Diane Ackerman
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Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
John Erskine
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Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
Louise Bogan
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Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.
David Quammen
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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur
Doug Larson
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If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.
Helen Keller
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It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word.
Kevin Kline
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Every language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved.
Casey Miller
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The eyes have one language everywhere.
George Herbert
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Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.
John Ciardi
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Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.
Samuel Johnson
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Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.
Anna Jameson
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Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
David Lodge
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It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase "As pretty as an airport" appear
Douglas Adams
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Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal.
William Shakespeare
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The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
Benjamin Franklin
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A whipper-snapper of criticism who quoted dead languages to hide his ignorance of life.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
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I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It's such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.
Belva Plain
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Speech happens to not be his language.
Madame de Stael
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The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
George Eliot
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Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
Albert Einstein
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To him who in the love of Nature holdsCommunion with her visible forms, she speaksA various language.
William Cullen Bryant
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Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.
Humphrey Davy
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If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
Confucius
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No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
George Bernard Shaw
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The clichテδゥ is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichテδゥs, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.
Gerald Brenan
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Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
Jose Saramago
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A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
William Hazlitt
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Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
Octavio Paz
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The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle
John Ruskin
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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Language is the light of the mind
John Stuart Mill
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When it's done with being graceful and poetic, language is meant to communicate, after all.
Max Barry
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Duty, then is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.
Robert E. Lee