Quotes About Language

The language of silence is the language of God, the language of silence is the language of the heart.

Any Name of God in any language is worthy of respect but the original Name of God in the Semitic language is Allah. This (Semitic) is the language of the celestial entities. It is by this Name that the angels call upon God and it is attached to the Title of every Prophet.

I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used language as a medium for the communication of thought; thus the learning of language was coincident with the acquisition of knowledge.

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It's a language aside from the language they have with strangers.

For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence.

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.

Music is the language of God. God's language, music, is not like mathematics or geometry. It is a language of love. If we love music, that is enough.

Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.

I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.

I tell my students to think of poems as language plus, language with value added beyond its everyday use.

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

Children must master the language of things before they master the language of words.

Color is a language. It is the language of painting. How painting expresses itself is in large part with color.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

When we form heart-centered beliefs within our bodies, in the language of physics we're creating the electrical and magnetic expression of them as waves of energy, which aren't confined to our hearts or limited by the physical barrier of our skin and bones. So clearly we're speaking to the world around us in each moment of every day through a language that has no words: the belief-waves of our hearts.

I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.

We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.

We Liberal Democrats believe in dialogue. We believe in cooperation with both sides of industry and between both sides of industry. And we believe in the language of cooperation. We reject the language of confrontation.

My earliest memory is having my grandfather, who was born in 1899, read the newspaper to me in a foreign language. I was utterly captivated by the fact that he took the time to read it to me. I didn't know what he saying, it was in a completely different language. I think it was in French. But I was just so honored that he was with me and talking to me. It's extraordinary that you know someone from that time, and also someone that's willing to give you the time of day, who's lived through so much.

Hip hop is at its essence a folk music, because it speaks the language that people are still speaking at ground zero, it speaks the language that people speak on the streets.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

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.

I had a teacher once who said, "If you are going to write fiction, you should only read poetry." I have always been interested in the writers who care about their sentences and who really work on that level. I have always said that I hate writing, I love revision. So, the language is really important to me. And the comedy and the horror that come out of the language.

The language of the heart is mankind's main common language.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too. And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

How torturous is the "churchly" language one must speak in church - the tone, style, habit. It is all artificial; there is a total absence of a simple human language. With what a sigh of relief one leaves this world of cassocks, and kissing and church gossip. As soon as one leaves, one sees: wet bare branches, fog which floats over fields, trees, homes. Sky. Early dusk. And it all tells an incredibly simple truth.

In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.

George Orwells 1984 frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: its not a celebration of poetic language. Its decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what 1984 shows is that language can be a dirty trick.

The language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

We have room but for one Language here and that is the English Language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house.

A people without a language of its own is only half a nation. A nation should guard its language more than its territories, 'tis a surer barrier and a more important frontier than mountain or river.

There is a pretty interesting document called 'action writing.' Which is not all about spontaneity and first thought, best thought,' but a certain kind of attention to the smallest increments of the phonemes of language, The kind of power of connection, what he is able to do with language.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God.

No instance exists of a person's writing two language perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

I do try to incorporate particular rhythmic and generally sonic motifs I discover in music as such, and if one thinks of language in a narrow sense, that, perhaps, suggests a possibility for a rhythmic sensibility that enters poetry from outside of language.

It's very rare that someone who is so good at the language of numbers, is as good at the language of life. They're two very different worlds.

The language of Doctor Johnson and Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale, and that of their adult contemporaries, was the stately language of the time, polished, stylish, unordinary, even in the intimate pages of their diaries, and the regime of instruction was severe and practical.

Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. Or don’t imagine it. Look outside. Human language is our attempt at navigating God’s language; it is us running between the lines of His epic, climbing on the vowels and building houses out of the consonants.

I think in Somali, I cuss in Somali, when I'm afraid I reach for somali and this language is very rich, very filling. It's an unflinching language; the crudest most terrible things sound perfectly normal in Somali.

I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Our mission goes beyond commerce, it goes beyond technology. Our intent is to preserve music's importance in our lives, music is the language of love, of laughter, of heartbreak, of mystery. It's the world's true, true, without question, universal language.

Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.