Quotes About Language

If all existence is a dialogue, how is it there is still so much left unsaid?

Famosity? There must be such a word. I used it!

You keep saying that. I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus. No, Wouk admitted, he didn't. "You had better learn it," said Feynman. "It's the language God talks.

Calculus, like other forms of mathematics, is much more than a language; it's also an incredibly powerful system of reasoning.

Actually, languages can be very tricky in this respect. The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive but none in which a double positive makes a negative—to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, "Yeah, yeah.

The word is the atom of the mind

Love . . . requires that you learn to read the lover in her own language, not translate her into yours.

Zen is perhaps best known not so much for the negation of speech, which would represent an extreme view, but for inventing a creative new style of expression that uses language in unusual and ingenious fashions to surpass a reliance on everyday words and letters.

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.

La unica forma de poder deshacerse de la palabra [un termino], es hablar lo bastante sobre las cosas y finalmente escapar de la palabra y conseguir lo que realmente quieres.

Tryphena?" "It's Greek. Means 'delicate.' Brin came across it the other day somewhere in the Bible,

the failure of language." "It's a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.

hackerese pejorative.

Opium arrived in China around the seventh century via Arab traders, whose opium-laden camels traveled east over the fabled Silk Road. The Arabic connection is most evident in the Chinese word for opium, yapian, which is probably a corruption of the Arabic word for opium, afiyun. The Arabic word was, in turn, based on Afyon, the name of a province in what is now modern-day Turkey, where the Arabs believed opium originated.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.

Recognize, though, that graphs and equations provide an economical and effective way of expressing things that torture the tongue.

Mathematics is the means by which we deduce the consequences of physical principles. More than that, it is the indispensable language in which the principles of physical science are expressed.

It seems to me that to understand these early Greeks, it is better to think of them not as physicists or scientists or even philosophers, but as poets.