Quotes About Language

My truth" becomes opposed to, or destructive of, "your truth." To return to the image I already used: when we take the tropical bird of religious language and put it in a cage, it becomes a bird of prey.

And therein lies my problem – how to hold together all the words about God that I have learned as a good Christian and then as a professional theologian with my growing awareness, especially over the last three decades of my life, of God as Mystery. Come to think of it, this problem of "words" may not only be bubbling under the other problems I've dealt with in the preceding two chapters: it may be one of the major causes of those problems.

Religious language, like all language, can also so easily be used as an instrument of power by which some people seek to control other people. That's an abiding danger every time we open our mouth and speak, contemporary philosophers tell us, so we have to be aware of it and be on guard against it. Our guard goes down and the temptation to turn religious language into power language goes up when we take that language in a too literal, or too precise, or univocal sense.

Translation: the primary purpose of all the language in the Bible and in the creeds and catechism is to tell us how to live rather than provide us with clear, final answers about the nature of God and the universe.

We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. "If the water is dark," goes a German aphorism, "the lake must be deep." Instead of using good words like smart, they choose sophisticated or erudite.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It 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.

there are a few acts more aggressive than describing someone else

You know you're an Arizona native when you have to look up "mass transit" in the dictionary.

The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.

If the first requirement of a civilisation is the possession of its own language, the second must be the pursuit of a literary tradition. Books are, in historian Barbara Tuchman's words, the carriers of civilisation.

Wetiko is elusive and mercurial, for whatever we say wetiko is, it isn't, in that it is always more, less, and other than what we are able to say it is in language.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

You already speak German; you just don't know it yet.

The way of the heart is much less environmentally deterministic than the brain and is based on a view of the universe as essentially a friendly place. The heart speaks in the language summarized by author Elizabeth Rivers: "When something doesn't go my way, I let go of my idea of how it should be, trusting that my mind [brain] doesn't know the larger picture.

The power of impulses which haunt our phantasies, of imaginary modes of being which ignite the poetic word, and of the all-embracing, that most powerful something which menaces us so long as we feel unloved, in all these registers and perhaps in others as well, the dialectic of power and form takes place, which insures that language only captures the foam on the surface of life.

Language is for itself the order of the Same. The world is its Other. The attestation of this otherness arises from language's reflexivity with regard to itself, whereby it knows itself as being in being in order to bear on being.

What did we ever do before text messaging?' Vi asked... Write notes to each other. On paper' Seems positively archaic now.' Pretty soon we'll just be wired into each other and orject our thoughts back and forth,' Skye said...

Contemporary poets got so obscure that poetry kind of fell out of favor,

To speak a language that was as intimate and free as certain dreams, saying darkly, thrillingly, My cock inside of you. Your come in my mouth ... He focused on the boy's slim, tight hips; with the tip of his tongue he tasted an asshole's bitter, forbidden mystery.

I think its rather peculiar. It's not in keeping with our founding documents, our founding vision. But I'd guess you'd have to ask the Obama administration why they purged all this language from their platform. There sure is a lot of mention of government, so I guess I would put the onus on them to answer why they did all these purges of God.

English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.

The permutations of English corruption in India were endless