Human Language Quotes - Page 2

• There is a language beyond human language, an elemental language, one that arises from the land itself.

  Linda Hogan

  Land, Language, Arise

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• Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help.

  Thomas Keating

  Prayer, Powerful, Helping

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• No one seriously doubts that if Piraha children are brought up in Boston they'll be speaking Boston English, that is, that the capacities are present, unlike other animals, as far as is known. There's no challenge to the theory - not mine, but everyone's - that the human language faculty provides the means for generation of an infinite array of structured expressions.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Mean, Animal

  Source: libcom.org

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• As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

  Umberto Eco

  Philosophy, Lying, Want

  "Umberto Eco: 'People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged'". Interview with Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. November 27, 2011.

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• To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

  Robert Harris

  Girlfriend, Years, Sides

  Robert Harris (2008). “The Ghost”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

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• Non-violence means dialogue, using our language, the human language. Dialogue means compromise; respecting each other’s rights; in the spirit of reconciliation there is a real solution to conflict and disagreement. There is no hundred percent winner, no hundred percent loser—not that way but half-and-half. That is the practical way, the only way.

  Dalai Lama

  Inspirational, Real, Mean

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• One of the most frustrating words in the human language, as far as I could tell, was love. So much meaning attached to this one little word. People bandied it about freely, using it to describe their attachments to possessions, pets, vacation destinations, and favorite foods. In the same breath they then applied this word to the person they considered most important in their lives. Wasn’t that insulting? Shouldn’t there be some other term to describe deeper emotion?

  Alexandra Adornetto

  Vacation, Attachment, People

  Alexandra Adornetto (2010). “Halo”, p.12, Macmillan

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• A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

  Seymour Papert

  Learning, Thinking, Favors

  "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas". Book by Seymour Papert, 1980.

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• To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

  Richard Rorty

  Age, Suggestions, Legacy

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

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• The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.

  Malidoma Patrice Some

  Silence, Shadow, Language

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• Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

  Niels Bohr

  Independent, Judgement, Development

  Niels Bohr, Leon Rosenfeld (1999). “Collected works”

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• Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Men, Way, Language

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Homer A. Jack (2005). “The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi”, p.27, Courier Corporation

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• Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

  W. H. Auden

  Language, Metaphorical, Humans

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• Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Ideas, Effort

  James Clerk Maxwell, W. D. Niven (2003). “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell”, p.328, Courier Corporation

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• In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language.

  Mikhail Tal

  Games, Feelings, Chess

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• An immune system of enormous complexity is present in all vertebrate animals. When we place a population of lymphocytes from such an animal in appropriate tissue culture fluid, and when we add an antigen, the lymphocytes will produce specific antibody molecules, in the absense of any nerve cells. I find it astonishing that the immune system embodies a degree of complexity which suggests some more or less superficial though striking analogies with human language, and that this cognitive system has evolved and functions without assistance of the brain.

  Niels Kaj Jerne

  Animal, Cells, Brain

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• Prayer simply means a longing of the heart, it is the wish felt, - it may be expressed, or not expressed. It may take the form of human language or it may never be uttered at all; still it is a prayer, if God only hears it in the secret recess of the heart.

  Keshub Chandra Sen

  Prayer, Heart, Mean

  Sermon at Hackney Unitarian Church, London, April 24, 1870.

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• I am calling attention just to the main points of these tremendously important matters, which can be understood better by pious meditation than explained by human language.

  Martin Chemnitz

  Meditation, Important, Attention

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• We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.

  Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

  Men, Order, Data

  Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Roger Lewin (1996). “Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind”, Wiley

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• Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.

  Jay Griffiths

  Cat, Animal, Squirrels

  "Fifty years on, the silence of Rachel Carson's spring consumes us" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2012.

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• Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

  Thomas Paine

  Mean, Information, Language

  Thomas Paine (2016). “The Writings of Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason”, p.86, Thomas Paine

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• Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Crafts, Language, Typography

  "15 Free Fonts That Harken Back To Vintage Typography" by Katherine Brooks, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 7, 2014.

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• Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

  Carl Sandburg

  Art, Language, Plastic

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• All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that nothing could attempt to convince me of error.

  Paul Eluard

  Dream, Errors, Imagination

  Paul Eluard, “At The Window”

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• In your relationship with God there are also times when you want to say things and you're trying to find the words to express them. In a human relationship sometimes you struggle for words and you've got to do it, but in a relationship with God he can actually give you a language which enables you to communicate. In a relationship with God you feel things and you want to express them and you're not limited by human language. You can express what you really feel in your heart, through a language that he gives you, and that helps you to communicate with God.

  Nicky Gumbel

  Struggle, Heart, Giving

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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