Quotes About Language

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and so ridiculous.

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

A lot of words in English confuse the idea of life and electricity, like the word livewire.

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.

You can change your world by changing your words... Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Pay attention to whatever you say because a knot tied with your tongue can't be undone with your teeth.

Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.

Life is like a grammar lesson. You find the past perfect and the present tense.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

If you are that upset with it being used by people not of color, stop using it yourself.

Hardly ever do we hear anything that does not make us regret something that we have said

precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.

at that time I still supposed that it was by means of words that one communicated the truth to others.

Os nomes que designam as coisas respondem sempre a uma noção da inteligência, estranha às nossas impressões verdadeiras e que nos força a eliminar delas tudo o que não se reporte a essa noção.

Medicine, when it fails to cure, busies itself with changing the sense of verbs and pronouns.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Não há nada como o desejo para impedir que as coisas que se dizem possuam qualquer semelhança com o que se tem no pensamento.

Nas?l ki baz? yarat?klar, tabiat?n üretmekten vazgeçti?i bir canl? türünün son örnekleriyse, acaba –dil, kelimeler, dü?üncelerin çözümlenmesi icat edilmemi? olsa–ruhlar aras?nda mevcut olabilecek ileti?imin yegâne örne?i de müzik mi diye dü?ünüyordum. Müzik, devam? gelmemi? bir olas?l?k gibidir; insanl?k ba?ka yollara, konu?ma ve yaz? diline sapm??t?r.

There is nothing like desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one's mind.

A verdade que depositamos nas palavras não abre caminho diretamente, não tem irresistível evidência. Cumpre que decorra o tempo necessário para que se possa formar no interlocutor uma verdade da mesma espécie. E então o adversário político, que, apesar de raciocínios e provas, considerava traidor ao sectário da doutrina oposta, chega a compartilhar das detestadas convicções quando já não interessam àquele que antes tentava inutilmente difundi-las.

The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.