Language Quotes - Page 15

• Unless the chemist learns the language of mathematics, he will become a provincial and the higher branches of chemical work, that require reason as well as skill, will gradually pass out of his hands.

  Alexander Crum Brown

  Hands, Skills, Branches

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• When a language creates - as it does - a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

  Christopher Ricks

  Communication, Past, Community

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• I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Integrity, Energy, Sacredness

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1972). “Early Lectures: 1838-1842”, p.266, Harvard University Press

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• Philosophy attempts, not to discover new truths about the world, but to gain a clear view of what we already know and believe about it. That depends upon attaining a more explicit grasp of the structure of our thoughts; and that in turn on discovering how to give a systematic account of the working of language, the medium in which we express our thoughts.

  Michael Dummett

  Philosophy, Believe, Philosophical

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• If (early humans) weren't using and refining language I would like to know what they were doing with their autocatalytically increasing brains.

  Dean Falk

  Brain, Evolution, Humans

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• How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

  Black Hawk

  Native American, Native Language, Looks

  Black Hawk, John B. Patterson (1836). “Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk: With an account of the late war”, p.97

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• Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

  Gail Godwin

  Dream, Mean, Follow Your Dreams

  Gail Godwin (2011). “The Finishing School”, p.3, Ballantine Books

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• All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is"... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.

  John D. Barrow

  God, Spiritual, Littles

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• Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently ... It is that which feels & discovers what is, the REAL which we see not, which exists not for our senses... Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things... Imagination too shows what is ... Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!

  Ada Lovelace

  Real, Science, Discovery

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• [In the Royal Society, there] has been, a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.

  Thomas Sprat

  Men, Numbers, Expression

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• If apple is the language of the future, then art must be the core.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Apples, Core

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• Language is the principal tool with which we communicate; but when words are used carelessly or mistakenly, what was intended to advance mutual understanding may in fact hinder it; our instrument becomes our burden

  Irving Copi

  Communication, Science, Understanding

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• One way to prevent conversation from being boring is to say the wrong thing.

  Francis Joseph Sheed

  Communication, Way, Boring

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• Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

  Richard Chenevix Trench

  Communication, Lightning, Genius

  Richard Chenevix Trench (1867). “On the Study of Words Lectures Addressed (originally) to the Pupils at the Diocesan Training-school, Winchester by Richard Chenevix Trench”, p.24

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• The world is not the most pleasant place. Eventually, your parents leave you and nobody is going to go out of their way to protect you unconditionally. You need to learn to stand up for yourself and what you believe and sometimes, pardon my language, kick some ass.

  Queen Elizabeth II

  Motivation, Believe, Philosophical

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• It is the distance between us that creates language.

  Robin Skelton

  Distance, Philosophical

  Robin Skelton (1995). “Or So I Say: Contentions & Confessions : a Happenstance Book”, p.65, Ekstasis Editions

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• Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

  Thomas Nagel

  Common Sense, Psychology, Ordinary

  Thomas Nagel (1989). “The View From Nowhere”, p.166, Oxford University Press

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• There is only one caste... the caste of humanity. There is only one religion... the religion of love. There is only one language... the language of the heart.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Spiritual, Heart, Humanity

  Sathya Sai Baba (1988). “Education in human values”

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• The Second Amendment's language and historical and philosophical background demonstrated that it was designed to guarantee individuals the possession of certain kinds of arms for three purposes: (1) crime prevention or what we would today describe as self-defense; (2) national defense; and (3) preservation of individual liberty.

  Don Kates

  Philosophical, Gun, Self

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• There is the cause for pleasure and for pain:
  But music moves us, and we know not why?
  We feel the tears, but cannot trace their source.
  Is it the language of some other state, Born of its memory!
  For what can wake The soul's strong instinct of another world,
  Like music！

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Strong, Memories, Inspiration

  "The Poetical Works of Miss Landon".

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• Invent a new language anyone can understand.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Creation

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2007). “Poetry as Insurgent Art”, p.6, New Directions Publishing

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• Love will find its way through all languages on its own.

  Rumi

  Hate, Way, I Hate You

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• The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Character, Data

  Andrea Moro, Noam Chomsky, Ivano Caponigro, Daniel B. Kane (2015). “The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages”, p.37, MIT Press

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• The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.

  Richard Stallman

  Trust, Powerful, Appreciate

  "How I Do My Computing". Personal Website, www.stallman.org.

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• The Holy Spirit speaks many languages; among them the languages of art in all its forms.

  Frank Griswold

  Art, Spirit, Speak

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