Human Language Quotes - Page 2

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

Thomas Keating

Prayer, Powerful, Helping

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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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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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When we listen to improvisational jazz, or solo classical violinists, the way they phrase and inflect melodies feels vocal, like they’re talking to us. When I was figuring out how to perform solo, I wanted to move back and forth between bass riffs, melody, and harmony, so I often used sounds instead of — or alongside — the words of a song. I found that if I sang a line using the consonants, vowels, shadings, and inflection we recognize as human language sounds, people responded as if I were talking to them.

Bobby McFerrin

Song, Moving, Talking

"Sing Your Prayers: An Interview With Bobby McFerrin". Omega Institute Interview, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 11, 2012.

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Therefore, the two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.

Werner Heisenberg

Art, Reality, Two

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Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.

Terence McKenna

Mean, Political, Historical

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

Larry Wall

Language, Computer, Ambiguous

Source: bigthink.com

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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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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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The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reflection, Mind, Language

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834). “Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions”, p.203

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The fundamental thing about human languages is that they can and should be used to describe something; and this something is, somehow, the world. To be constantly and almost exclusively interested in the medium - in spectacle-cleaning - is a result of a philosophical mistake.

Karl Popper

Mistake, Philosophical, Fundamentals

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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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How torturous is the "churchly" language one must speak in church - the tone, style, habit. It is all artificial; there is a total absence of a simple human language. With what a sigh of relief one leaves this world of cassocks, and kissing and church gossip. As soon as one leaves, one sees: wet bare branches, fog which floats over fields, trees, homes. Sky. Early dusk. And it all tells an incredibly simple truth.

Alexander Schmemann

Home, Kissing, Simple

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I think the most important work that is going on has to do with the search for very general and abstract features of what is sometimes called universal grammar: general properties of language that reflect a kind of biological necessity rather than logical necessity; that is, properties of language that are not logically necessary for such a system but which are essential invariant properties of human language and are known without learning. We know these properties but we don't learn them. We simply use our knowledge of these properties as the basis for learning.

Noam Chomsky

Thinking, Important, Essentials

Source: chomsky.info

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