Quotes About Language

In words are seen the state of mind, character and disposition of the speaker. — Plutarch

Monkeys can't talk, stupid!

Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me.

The clean language and distinction between output and outcome was first made clear to me in a talk by Robert Fabricant called "Behavior Is Our Medium".

Like Bitcoin, there is little stopping Ethereum from being an alternative currency to fiat and commodity currencies. You can conceivably trade anything using Ethereum, but this is not Ethereum's strength in comparison to other cryptocurrencies (CCs) – they can all do this. It's rather the computing language that allows the smart contracts to exist that makes Ethereum more valuable than BTC (in my opinion). The

In essence, the fundamental benefits of investing into Ethereum is the cryptographic nature, it's anonymity, it's universality, it's divisibility, and most specifically, it's coding language which specifically targets it for automated transactions and contracts. The

This is the real gift of human language and our desire to connect: that it works.

The linguist still believed in the superstition of logic

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. "English," writes Virginia Woolf, "which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache." … Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.

En aquel entonces también las palabras me parecieron de piedra, solo que de piedra fluida y cristalina. La piedra se solidificaba al terminar cada palabra, para quedar escrita para siempre en el tiempo. ¿No eran así las palabras de tus mayores?

Metamorfosis! ¿Qué sería "metamorfosis" sin el diccionario…? Un montón de letritas negras.

Há muitos anos que me ocupo dessa tradução: a esfera privada na qual, todavia, ainda não me instalei confortavelmente, e onde tudo deve caminhar com conscienciosidade e responsabilidade, é a língua alemã.

He would however permit himself to relieve the Past of the absurd feminine gender with which the Germans have credited it. That the Germans should provide their finest achievements, those abstract ideas, with feminine articles is one of those incomprehensible barbarisms by which they nullify their own merits. He would in future sanctify everything connected with God with a masculine affix.

Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words

I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

The only wealth I'm interested in is a wealth of words.

There are so many who know more than I do, who understand the world better than I do. I would be truly learned, a great scholar, if only I could retain everything I've learned from those I have known. But then would I still be me? And isn't all that only words? Words grow old, too; they change their meaning and their usage. They get sick just as we do; they die of their wounds and then they are relegated to the dust of dictionaries. And where am I in all this?

How was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy?

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle…. Writing in my mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again…. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

Melt down the fat. Cut the cosmetics and coloratura. The classic rule of good journalism: honor the verb, sacrifice the adjective.

One polite fellow asked her where she was from. She told him from New York State. Why, he asked, do New Yorkers always say State? Why, because, she answered,—and her eyes were big with surprise,—no one would want to say they were from New York City.

Wow!" I say. This is a new Algonquian word I learned from Namontack. Wow is their word for wonder and awe

You speak Quichua better than we do," said Wakcha, a proud young Indian who always wore a pith helmet, a sign of great prestige among his people. "You hear us too well. We are talking away, saying to ourselves, 'They do not hear,' and then you answer us!