Quotes About Language

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. Derek Walcott

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.

Die größte Freude ist die, aus verschiedenen Sprachen auswählen zu können, was den Inhalt des Geistes am besten ausdrückt.

neuro-linguistic programming

A good communicator affects our physiology. The power of voice can entrance us even induce or remove pain.

There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

Once you break your identification with the system, with the authoritarian technics that are driving planetary murder, your language and your actions become very different. Once you identify with the real, living planet, everything changes.

Instead of René Descartes' famous "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), I propose "Communico ergo sum," (I communicate, therefore I exist") as the philosophical proof of man's existence.

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

In fact the English word 'demon' is full of a value judgement that is wrongly attributed to the words rakshasa and asura.

Parrots can remember and repeat words and speak like human beings. But they do not understand what they are saying. As far as they are concerned, these are only sounds that humans have taught them to say.

God had no form or name. But God existed—conscious, sentient. Humans refer to God in the masculine, but that reveals the inadequacy of human language. God is neither male nor female, neither human nor animal, neither plant nor mineral, neither wave nor particle. He is beyond it all, an entity uncontained by measurement or word.

both mythology and philosophy present the same idea: the former communicates through a story, along with symbols and rituals, while the latter uses precise language. Mythology creates a more visceral experience, and so appeals to everyone, not just the intellectual.

With new words are created new worlds, as they are vehicles of new ideas. They enable the process of expanding the mind. The

Jeez banana! Shut your freaking gob!

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.

You do have the idea of being 'just good friends?'" He gave her a sideways look. "For so high and honorable an estate," Roshaun said, " 'just' seems a poor modifier to choose.

Words -- as I speak or write them -- make a path on which I walk.

I get offered a World War II movie at least once a week just because I speak German and was born there. I have always stayed away from it because I didn't want to be put into that box.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.