Quotes About Language

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.

The majority of the people of the world today are unsane, not insane, unsane meaning having been exposed to methods of evaluation that have long rendered obsolete, our language in the future will change to a saner language where we have no argument in it, 'can there be such a language?' there is, when engineers talk to each other, it's not subject to interpretation, they use math, they use descriptive systems, if I interpreted what another engineer said in the way I think he meant it: you couldn't build bridges, dams, power transmission lines. The language has to have meaning

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

The politics of language and the politics of writing really got to me. I've heard this phrase more than once now: this idea of the poetry wars, or the idea that people within the space of writing are at odds with one another or manipulating language to further one's political stance, manipulating language in ways that really felt dirty to me. All of these things worked their way into and through language for me.

I'm chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people's expectations. I think music is the primary model-how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I'm just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.

The important thing is to be able to understand anyone who has something useful to say. - There is a general moral here. Be very careful and very clear about what you say. But do not be dogmatic about your own language. Be prepared to express any careful thought in the language your audience will understand. And be prepared to learn from someone who talks a language with which you are not familiar.

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.

Her voice was slightly accented but her French was perfect. Someone who'd not just learned the language but loved it. And it showed with every syllable. Gamache knew it was impossible to split language from culture. That without one the other withered. To love the language was to respect the culture.

Language is always ambivalent. Its forms mutate and connect in unexpected ways. It's hard to instrumentalize language. But I think it's better to explore linguistic potentials than to keep on using language that's past its expiration date.

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.

I love communicating with people, and sometimes language is not enough. I think that's what poetry is, where you can mess with language and get through to things that can't be described or communicated through regular language or scientific processes.

In Europe there's kind of a reaction to the European Union, kind of a move towards some kind of regionalization. It's more advanced in some regions than others, like in Spain for example. Catelan was repressed under Franco. People spoke it, but not publicly. It's now the language of Catelonia. The Basque language is being revived, not just the language but the culture, the folk music and everything else. So you're getting more diverse societies, and it's happening in Britain as well.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

Every time another tribe becomes extinct and their language dies, another way of life and another way of understanding the world disappears forever. Even if it has been painstakingly studied and recorded, a language without a people to speak - it means little. A language can only live if its people live, and if today's uncontacted tribes are to have a future, we must respect their right to choose their own way of life.

First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.

The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother? The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

Originally when we talked about language disorder it was a catastrophic language disorder. It's substantial, and from a treatment standpoint it's okay to keep diluting that term, but from a research standpoint we need to be much more precise. I wish somebody would take up the mantle of just that particular task.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

This is the problem with language, and this is what makes silent movies fun, because the connection with them, me or the audience is not with the language. There's no question of interpretation of what we are saying it's just about feeling. You create your own story

... I try ... to use my own voice in a way that shows caring, respect, appreciation, and patience. Your voice, your language, help determine your culture. And part of how a corporate culture is defined is how the people who work for an organization use language.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

I want to find a genie in a bottle that can grant me three wishes. I want to be able to speak, read, write, and understand any language ever written or spoken, just any language throughout the history of man. That would be one of my wishes from the genie, so I would have to put "multilingual" on the resume, should I ever find the genie.

When we start making distinctions between soul and spirit, we're in very, very murky waters. There is the whole issue of the English language, which has a rather limited vocabulary when it comes to psychological descriptions, not to speak of spiritual descriptions. We're good mythically - the English language is superb for myth. But we're not very good for psychology or spirituality.

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.

All the characters are made out of words. With reading, I understand that the people aren't real but the fact that they are made out of language and are made out of words is extremely powerful to me. It becomes transformative for me. Different people have different ways of trying to make stories using language.

I believe there is no liturgy in the world, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England. And though the main of it was compiled considerably more than two hundred years ago, yet is the language of it, not only pure, but strong and elegant in the highest degree.

Learning to read in one language helps us read a second language.

Learning astrology is like learning any foreign language. You already have the ideas, concepts, and experiences of your life within you; you are just learning a new language for what you are already experiencing.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

The experimental film scene was very much misogynistic as well. I don't know if you have read what little attention was given to the films of Joyce Wieland, who was the wife of Michael Snow. Michael was the "genius" and she was not. If you look at the films they're wonderful, but very different. Michael was very proud of the films too, so it was not coming from him. It was coming from the general environment. I think both Chantal Akerman and I shared that. We wanted to find a language, which was the language of women.

There is only one caste... the caste of humanity. There is only one religion... the religion of love. There is only one language... the language of the heart.

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.

People think that digital language is a fixed language, but it's not: it's very fluid. It's like I'm doing a painting where the paint refuses to dry.

Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries. By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text.

When you play music, you don't need a language. Music is a language.

Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.