Quotes About Language

Quote is a verb. Quotation is the noun.

THE HEBREW WORD for "truth" is composed of the three letters that are the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The three Hebrew letters that spell "falsehood" stand next to one another. This tells us that truth creates a firm foundation, like the three legs of a stool, while falsehood is unstable because it stands on a narrow base.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

Birds are sensitive to mispronunciation, even more sensitive than the French.

We can never fully understand the hearts and minds of people . . . unless we can speak directly to them in their own language so that the implications, not just the words, come through clearly.

The Old Testament, as you know, is full of pictures of New Testament truth. It is not only a book of history, though it is that, revealing to us the great seed-plots of God's plan of redemption for the human race; it also illustrates many great truths later developed in the New Testament, setting them before us in pictorial language so that we may apply them in our hearts and daily lives.

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

I don't know what an interrobang is." "It's a glyph that combines a question mark and an exclamation point.

Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result.

Since their playing lacked nuance, they deprived themselves of speech—for nuance, after all, is where meaningful speech resides. Without it, the language of music is ineluctably returned to its postnatal beginnings, where the only sounds to be heard are the inarticulate cries of an infant.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because , romantic lyrics from but and if . Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.

One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.

I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.

it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms

It's essential to be able to communicate in English, to talk to my team-mates and then in my personal life outside the football.

I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

I personally am not conscious of my accent.

Some persons never attain to the happy art of perspicuous expression, and it is equally true that some persons, thro' a mental defect of their own, will judge the most correct and certain language of others to be indefinite and ambiguous.

It is odd how learned persons fail to see that new terms and definitions are apt to mean new doubts and litigation.

I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

I never felt that although we were based in Germany, Puma was and should be considered as a German brand. So we restructured it in a way that positioned us as a global brand, with English being the corporate language, rather than us looking at it from a German perspective.

I got into Shakespeare and all of that stuff in high school and then got out of it because it got too complicated. But all of those things just helped me to put words together. It gave me a different perspective.

Some people say that their pets will tell them when it's time to go. I don't believe that. No animal of mine has ever told me he was ready to die. I wish it were that simple. Dogs can communicate, but they cannot talk, nor do they think in our language or on our terms.