Quotes About Language

One of the problems with musicals and opera is you can't ever hear all the words.

I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.

We want our men and women to be closely attuned to the cultures in which they operate and to speak the local language.

I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.

When we automated away the elevator operator function, who knew that all the descendants of those operators would become social media marketers, machine learning engineers, and all these other jobs that we didn't even have a language to describe back then.

Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.

My opinion is that more languages you speak, better it is, but when you come to America, you speak English.

it would be a very good thing if people were taught how to speak. Language is the noblest instrument we have, either for the revealing or the concealing of thought; talk itself is a sort of spiritualized action; and conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are the artist's materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Indeed, in many respects, she was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

I am getting rather astonishing in my Italian conversation. I believe I talk a mixture of Dante and the worst modern slang.

Mere words.. Was there anything so real as words?

When I see a spade I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade!

Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

Was there anything so real as words?

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason why I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.

By the way, is there any difference between 'grey' and 'gray'? I believe there is, but I don't know what it is. In one place in the poem Smithers suggests 'gray'. In others he leaves 'grey'. Perhaps he is seeing red. I believe they are sympathetic colours in spectroscope investigations.

Palabras! ¡Simples palabras! ¡Qué terribles eran! ¡Cuán claras, vívidas y crueles! Parece que uno no puede escaparse de ellas. ¡Y, sin embargo, qué magia sutil contienen! Parecen conferir una forma plástica a las cosas informes y tienen una música propia, tan dulce como la del violín o la del laúd. ¡Simples palabras! ¿Hay algo más real que las palabras?

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life.

An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.

It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces a false impression.

but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame...