Quotes About Language

language is sacred. It has glory, even in ordinary speech. The way most people use it, it's like a winged horse pulling a junk wagon.

Those wonderful coincidences of sound and sense between one language and another were also at work, giving each new term an alluring resonance.

Las palabras tienen el poder de volverte rico o pobre. Si quieres ser rico, aprende las palabras que te prepararán para ello. Lo mejor de todo es que… las palabras no cuestan.

It's called obfuscation in the interest of deniability. You might say it's our lingua franca.

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...Delta is for Charlie and Charlie is for Cain

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.

Mu means "no thing." Like "Quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.

Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

The entire description of the committee's work was a strange pattern of ordinary enough words put together in a most unordinary way, so that the explanation seemed far more complex than the thing he was trying to have explained.

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly.

we don't usually see that there's a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don't even have a term for it, so I'll have to use the Japanese mu.

these capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal, at remembering that "it's only a figure of speech"—with enormous consequences for our best and worst behaviors.

Kids learn dichotomies in the absence of any ill intent. When a kindergarten teacher says, "Good morning, boys and girls," the kids are being taught that dividing the world that way is more meaningful than saying, "Good morning, those of you who have lost a tooth and those of you who haven't yet.

If they're told, "The drug has a 95 percent survival rate," people, including doctors, are more likely to approve it than when told, "The drug has a 5 percent death rate.

Neuropsychologists are coming to recognize that there is a specialized subset of long-term memory. Remote memories are ones stretching back to your childhood—the name of your village, your native language, the smell of your grandmother's baking. They appear to be stored in some sort of archival way in your brain separate from more recent long-term memories. Often, in patients with a dementia that devastates most long-term memory, the more remote facets can remain intact.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. MARK TWAIN Did

Und es gibt auch Dinge, wo zwischen Erleben und Erfassen diese Unvergleichkeit herrscht. Immer aber ist es so, dass das, was wir in einem Augenblick ungeteilt und ohne Fragen erleben, unverständlich und verwirrt wird, wenn wir es mit den Ketten der Gedanken zu unserem bleibenden Besitze fesseln wollen. Und was groß und menscenfremd aussieht, solange unsere Worte von ferne danach langen, wird einfach und verliert das Beunruhigende, sobald es in den Tatkreis unseres Lebens eintritt.

E]in blasser, sozusagen grammatikalischer Schatten von Egoismus bleibt auf allem Tun haften, solange es keine Prädikate ohne Subjekte gebe.

The monkey said, "Bad. Bad, shitty bad.

Eliade once said in my hearing that the highest human being was the mystic, since he could actually perceive and experience ultimate timeless reality; the second highest was the poet, who could at least express what the mystic saw in adequate language; the third was the historian of religion like himself, who could only record the seeings and the words of the mystic and his poet.

Words unconsciously shift thoughts and feelings. One person's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter'; politicians jockey to commandeer 'family values,' and somehow you can't favor both 'choice' and 'life'.

Eh, Mijnheer, querenzie tomar la klopje inmensa de la cabeza vefrouvens in forma de ein skoboldash sundae?

They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in paraphrastics and aposiopesis, in a style abundant in chiasmus, metonymy, meiosis, oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much doubt was their intention.

Communication skills such as writing, speaking, and negotiating are crucial to a life of success.