Quotes About Language

Traits I can manage, prohibited words I can't.

Alien Affairs. Bad name I always thought, makes it sound like they're shagging them rather than investigating them.

My poetry is who I am down to the core, even though I do not write autobiographical verse. I have built a syntax and a language to understand myself in the world."—Peter Gizzi

Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it's never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you say is a lie.

Social cohesion was built into language long before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter - we're tribal by nature. Tribes today aren't the same as tribes thousand of years ago: It isn't just religious tribes or ethnic tribes now: It's sports fans, it's communities, it's geography.

asking myself from time to time if it might be possible to teach English in such a way that people would stop killing each other

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it.

Es gibt nur eine Art und Weise, eine andere Kultur zu verstehen. Sie zu leben. In sie einzuziehen, darum zu bitten, als Gast geduldet zu werden, die Sprache zu lernen. Irgendwann kommt dann vielleicht das Verständnis. Es wird dann immer wortlos sein. In dem Moment, in dem man das Fremde begreift, verliert man den Drang, es zu erklären. Ein Phänomen erklären heißt, sich davon entfernen.

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from

Roman language, Latin, is the foundation of not just Italian, but also of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Latin also left a deep impression on non-Latin languages, such as English. Even after Latin fell out of everyday use, it remained the unifying language of learning, particularly medicine and science.

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don't we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?

He felt wreathed in the music of language, and as long as he heard it and could write it down, as long as the pulse was in his veins, he didn't care if he lived out of the back of a truck or in some crappy rent-by-the-week for the rest of his life.

In the Bible we've been given the Gospel according to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke, and to John. But there is also a Gospel according to Jesus: the Revelation. In other Gospels, Jesus was incarnated (in-fleshed) in our space and time, speaking our language. In the Revelation, John is out-carnated (out-fleshed) from our space and time so that Jesus can reveal the eternal gospel in the language of heaven.

In scripture, names work like mirrors that reflect back the essence of a thing. But more than that, they help CREATE a thing.

Anyone who can control a major television channel can use it to pour out propaganda, but it is only this new generation which does not know how to resist it, provided it uses the right sort of codes, language and symbols. None of these codes, languages or symbols are conservative, or can be used by a conservative, because they are 'subversive' of the imagined 'authority' of a mythical 'establishment', which of course includes the Tories

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language.

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it. When I start talking about Qaanaaq, to myself or to others, I again start to lose what has never been truly mine.

One adopted their language, that of the teachers and the schools, one had none of one's own. At first it was like a release, like a key, like a road. The only road in. Much later one discovers that what one was let into, at that time, was a tunnel. From which one can never again escape. Not entirely. Not in this life.

adult language. Twang…heh, heh,

No puede existir una versión auténtica del cristianismo sin una entidad lingüística conocida como la palabra de Dios.

Now the whole world had one language and a common form of speech.

And the LORD said, “If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them.