872 quotes found
“Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is...”
“Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a wo...”
“We live at the level of our language.”
“The most satisfying of languages, Latin.”
“The written word is what distinguishes us from all other animal life forms on this earth.”
“Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement...”
“Silence is the mother of all tongues”
“To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.”
“Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?”
“Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everythi...”
“To start speaking my language start reading what I read... start reading what I have written. Listen to what I have listened.”
“Whenever the nature of the subject permits the reasoning process to be without danger carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in t...”
“There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.”
“The language we use can subtly influence our thinking. []On the face of it, the term web platform seems harmless. Describing the web as a platform puts it on par with other software environments. F...”
“The degree to which language exactly mirrors reality is debatable.”
“When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to ...”
“I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former”
“As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply...”
“There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words - for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, an...”
“Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.”
