Spoken Language Quotes

• Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

  Hermann Hesse

  Communication, Different, Littles

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• What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

  Jane Goodall

  Thinking, Language, Sophisticated

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• All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Speech, Language, Prepared

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)”, p.5302, Delphi Classics

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• If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Communication, Different, World

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• Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Language, Series

  Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.264, Simon and Schuster

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• Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

  Orson Scott Card

  Parenting, Language Words, Silence

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• I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

  Jane Goodall

  Thinking, Language, Communicate

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• Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages

  Dave Barry

  Travel, Inspirational Life, Learning

  Dave Barry (2010). “Dave Barry's Greatest Hits”, p.259, Ballantine Books

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• The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

  Maria Montessori

  Teaching, Men, Language

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• There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one teaches them anything.

  Maria Montessori

  Teacher, Children, Learning

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• When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!

  William Halsey

  Memorial Day, Military, War

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• Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection.

  Richard Leakey

  Communication, Reflection, Language

  Richard Leakey (2008). “The Origin Of Humankind”, p.125, Hachette UK

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• Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

  Swami Vivekananda

  Art, Creating, Use

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2681, Manonmani Publishers

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• However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Stars, Clouds, Fleeting

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.68, Graphic Arts Books

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• I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.

  Antonin Artaud

  Magic, Trying, Essentials

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.111, Grove Press

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• We are like dogs, cats, cows, rats ... What separates us from them and from the remaining matches against mammals is negligible. To have the same diseases. Rats spread plague like us, but we are just as contagious as them. And the dogs get diabetes, like we do, and get cancer, like us. And age, like us. And die, like us. Why then the biblical claim that man is the king of creation? Perhaps because only man has developed spoken language, the words, wherein lies its prodigious ability to lie.

  Fernando Vallejo

  Dog, Kings, Cancer

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• Everyone is used to speaking a slightly different "language" with their parents than with their peers, because spoken language changes every generation - like they say, the past is a foreign country - but I think this is intensified for children whose parents also grew up in a geographically foreign country.

  Elif Batuman

  Country, Children, Past

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The fact that slang is apt and forceful makes its use irresistibly tempting. Coarse or profane slang is beside the mark, but "flivver," "taxi," the "movies," "deadly" (meaning dull), "feeling fit," "feeling blue," "grafter," a "fake," "grouch," "hunch" and "right o!" are typical of words that it would make our spoken language stilted to exclude.

  Emily Post

  Blue, Fake, Feelings

  Emily Post (2007). “Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home”, p.62, Cosimo, Inc.

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• In conducting interviews, my fascination is not only with the content of the conversation, but also the overall delivery of spoken language - so much of one's personality and story is embedded within their speech, their rhythms, the structure of their thoughts, their use of particular diction or dialect.

  Steve Cosson

  Personality, Fascination, Diction

  "The Civilians’ Museum as Musical". Interview with Rachel Egan, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 12, 2014.

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• The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.

  Jane Goodall

  Communication, Kissing, Differences

  "Even Chimps Understand Sustainability". Interview with Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle, www.spiegel.de. October 7, 2015.

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• The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules.

  Judith Martin

  Silly, Ideas, People

  Judith Martin (1996). “Common courtesy: in which Miss Manners solves the problem that baffled Mr. Jefferson”

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• In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

  Stephen Leacock

  Two, Scotch, Canada

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• The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

  John Muir

  Stars, Eye, Wind

  John Muir (2010). “The Wilderness Journeys”, Canongate Books

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• It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

  Lafcadio Hearn

  Race, Literature, Next

  Lafcadio Hearn (2012). “Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn”, p.105, tredition

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