Common Language Quotes - Page 2

• No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

  Adrienne Rich

  Dream, Sleep, Rooms

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.9, W. W. Norton & Company

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• In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many. … Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs.

  Emilio G. Segre

  Political, Matter, Lasts

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• I shan't get free of my emotion by copying the tree faithfully, or by drawing its leaves one by one in the common language, but only after identifying myself with it.

  Henri Matisse

  Drawing, Tree, Copying

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1995). “Matisse on Art”, p.149, Univ of California Press

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• You, my Brown Guard, will regard it as a matter of course that this German people should go only by the way which Providence ordained for it when it gave to Germans the common language. So we go forward with the profoundest faith in God into the future. Would that which we have achieved have been possible if Providence had not helped us?

  Adolf Hitler

  People, Atheism, Matter

  Adolf Hitler “The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939: An English Translation of Representative Passages Arranged Under Subjects and Edited by Norman H. Baynes”

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• Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Spiritual, Memories, Heart

  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture in literature delivered only to the Swedish Academy, www.nobelprize.org. 1970.

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• Growing up in a family of actors, what's great about it is that they're very supportive and they understand what it's like to be an actor - the rejections, the highs and lows... and having a common language with them is great because you have shorthand speech.

  Chris Pine

  Growing Up, Rejection, Supportive

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• I have for a long time felt that our society is becoming more and more fractured and divisive and that you could go a whole day without really talking to another person. If you give people a good book to talk about, you can build a community out of a diverse group. A common language grows out of it.

  Nancy Pearl

  Book, Talking, Long

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• It doesn't happen very often that you get to work with some really good friends of yours and there's a common language between everyone, you don't have to explain what you're doing, you can just run with it. It makes it just so much easier and more relaxed.

  Elizabeth Perkins

  Running, Good Friend, Doing You

  "Elizabeth Perkins Talks K-9's for Must Love Dogs". MovieWeb Interview, movieweb.com. July 27, 2005.

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• I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.

  William Hazlitt

  Book, Ignorance, People

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.2452, Delphi Classics

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• There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  People, Way, Firsts

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• When a mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and results has arrived at his own conclusions, may they not be expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulae? If so, would it not be a great boon to such as well to express them so -- translating them out of their hieroglyphics that we might also work upon them by experiment?

  Michael Faraday

  Words Of Wisdom, Hieroglyphics, May

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• It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion wrighteous stupidityill be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.

  Karl Popper

  Mistake, Learning, Knowledge

  Karl Popper (2012). “In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years”, p.158, Routledge

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• Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language.

  Evan Parker

  Attitude, Thinking, People

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• Describing certain sounds, there's a common language that guitar players have.

  Joe Perry

  Player, Guitar, Sound

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• Mr. Blatchford says that there was not a Fall but a gradual rise. But the very word "rise" implies that you know toward what you are rising. Unless there is a standard you cannot tell whether you are rising or falling. But the main point is that the Fall like every other large path of Christianity is embodied in the common language talked on the top of an omnibus. Anybody might say, "Very few men are really Manly." Nobody would say, "Very few whales are really whaley."

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Fall, Men, Whales

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• By emphasizing the importance of a common language, we safeguard a proud legacy and help to ensure that America's future will be as great as her past.

  Ronald Reagan

  Past, America, Legacy

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• America is an open society, more open than any other in the world. People of every race, of every color, of every culture are welcomed here to create a new life for themselves and their families. And what do these people who enter into the American mainstream have in common? English, our shared common language.

  S. I. Hayakawa

  Race, Color, America

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• I believe it is our values and our ideals that ultimately bind us together as a nation. But it is the English language which serves as the means by which we can communicate these values to those around us. Our common language, English, is that which unites us.

  Asa Hutchinson

  Believe, Mean, Together

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• Though representatives of many ethnic groups came together in the United States, English became their common language. Apparently, this was a natural choice. One can imagine what would have happened if members of each nation moving to the U.S. had spoken only their own tongues and refused to learn English.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Moving, Choices, Together

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• Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation. The notion that in order to have a nation it is necessary for there to be a common language, a common territory and common culture has failed to stand the test of time or the scrutiny of scientific definition of objective reality... The community of economic life is the major feature within a nation, and it is the economy which holds together the people living in a territory. It is on this basis that the new Africans recognise themselves as potentially one nation, whose dominion is the entire African continent.

  Kwame Nkrumah

  Reality, Order, People

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• We understand … that what constitutes the dignity of a craft is that it creates a fellowship, that it binds men together and fashions for them a common language.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Fashion, Men, Together

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• There are three things without which there is no country--common language, common judicature, and co-tillage land--for without these a country cannot support itself in peace and social union.

  Thomas Davis

  Country, Land, Support

  Thomas Davis (1854). “Literary and Historical Essays”, p.174

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• He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language.

  Patti Smith

  Keys, Play, Circles

  Patti Smith (2010). “Just Kids”, p.169, A&C Black

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• In the last 100 years since the invention of sound reproduction, music has really taken off and it is much more a common language because of records and transportation.

  Jerry Garcia

  Taken, Years, Sound

  Source: medium.com

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• In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Life, Math, Lines

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