Language Quotes - Page 10

• I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect.

  Emily Carr

  Different, Dialect, Half

  Emily Carr (2009). “Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr”, p.289, D & M Publishers

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• When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

  Alan Perlis

  Funny Inspirational, Giving, Needs

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• Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

  Henry James

  Beautiful, Summer, Time

  Quoted in Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)

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• As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

  George Will

  Communication, Noise, Normal

  George F. Will (1978). “The pursuit of happiness, and other sobering thoughts”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

  Antonin Artaud

  Communication, Teeth, Beggar

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.549, Univ of California Press

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• The world was made before English language, and seemingly upon a different design.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Design, Different, World

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1999). “The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays”, p.97, Cooper Square Press

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• To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.

  Alice Sebold

  Beautiful, Narrative, Ifs

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• It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

  Mark Twain

  Hurt, Spring, Fall

  Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.3129, GENERAL PRESS

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• Dance is the hidden langauge of the soul, of the body.

  Martha Graham

  Inspirational, Dance, Art

  "Martha Graham Reflects on Her Art and a Life in Dance". archive.nytimes.com. March 31, 1985.

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• Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

  Nathanael West

  Prayer, Math, Men

  1933 Miss Lonely hearts.

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• Our language is the reflection of ourselves.

  Cesar Chavez

  Reflection

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• You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

  Geoffrey Willans

  Inspiration, Learning, German Language

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• A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

  Simone Weil

  Mind, Prison

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.26, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• We always translate the other person's language into our own language.

  Milton H. Erickson

  Translate, Persons

  Milton H. Erickson (1992). “The Wisdom of Milton H. Erickson: Human Behavior and Psychotherapy”, p.46, Ardent Media

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• Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

  Mark Strand

  Lasts, Firsts, Fillers

  "In the Presence of America: A Conversation with Mark Strand". Interview with Katharine Coles, weberstudies.weber.edu. 1992.

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• Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Art, Wall, Labels

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• I suggest that a culture adopting an alphabet would denigrate right hemispheric values because the alphabet is a left hemispheric mode of reception. And this right hemispheric denigration would manifest in two principal ways: Women's rights would be taken away, and images would be declared abominations.

  Leonard Shlain

  Taken, Two, Rights

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• What is music? Music is language. A human being wants to express ideas in this language, but not ideas that can be translated into concepts.

  Anton Webern

  Ideas, Want, Music Is

  Anton Webern (1975). “The path to the new music”, European Amer Music Dist Corp

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• I seek a form of language which will express my ideas for our time.

  Arshile Gorky

  Ideas, Form, Our Time

  Diane Waddmann, Arshile Gorky (1981). “Arshile Gorky: 1904-1948, a Retrospective”

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• How many languages do we really speak?

  Alfredo Jaar

  Speak

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• If a symbolic language dies, it tortures us like a nightmare, like a thousand piece orchestra grating on our nerves and tearing our mind to pieces.. .It is a corpse with no symbolic power or strength.

  Asger Jorn

  Mind, Orchestra, Nerves

  "Asger Jorn" by Arken Museum of Modern Art, (p. 166), 2002.

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• Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.

  Roland Barthes

  Skins

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• Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

  Gene Wolfe

  Communication, Men, Purpose

  Gene Wolfe (2009). “The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction”, p.111, Macmillan

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• The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

  Yann Martel

  Book, Different, Cinema

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. November 6, 2007.

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• The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Order, Two, Doe

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.218, Routledge

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