Language Quotes - Page 21

• Javier Chevanton don't speak the language too good.

  Kevin Bond

  Football, Speak

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• More and more as we come closer and closer in touch with nature and its teachings are we able to see the Divine and are therefore fitted to interpret correctly the various languages spoken by all forms of nature about us.

  George Washington Carver

  Nature, Teaching, Divinity

  George Washington Carver, Gary R. Kremer (1987). “George Washington Carver in his own words”

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• Nature is a book of many pages and each page tells a fascinating story to him who learns her language. Our fertile valleys and craggy mountains recite an epic poem of geologic conflicts. The starry sky reveal gigantic suns and space and time without end.

  A. E. Douglass

  Nature, Book, Epic

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• When I consider the multitude of associated forces which are diffused through nature - when I think of that calm balancing of their energies which enables those most powerful in themselves, most destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated together and be made subservient to the wants of creation, I rise from the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the beneficence, and grandeur, beyond our language to express, of the Great Disposer of us all.

  Michael Faraday

  Nature, Powerful, Thinking

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• Language makes infinite use of finite media.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Media, Use, Infinite

  Wilhelm von Humboldt, Wilhelm Humboldt (Freiherr von) (1972). “Linguistic variability & intellectual development”, Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

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• Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

  Andrzej Wajda

  Past, Anchors, Literature

  "'Why Not Have Our Own World?' Interview with Andrzej Wajda". Interview with Renata Murawska, sensesofcinema.com. 2005.

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• Language is much closer to film than painting is.

  Sergei Eisenstein

  Painting, Film

  Sergei Eisenstein (2014). “Film Form: Essays in Film Theory”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Wish, Ordinary, Atoms

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• The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things.

  Tim Berners-Lee

  Heart, Simple, Complexes

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• To learn a new language is, therefore, always a sort of spiritual adventure; it is like a journey of discovery in which we find a new world.

  Ernst Cassirer

  Spiritual, Adventure, Journey

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• One barrier... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.

  David Perkins

  Teaching, Learning, Vocabulary

  David Perkins (2008). “Smart Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds”, p.143, Simon and Schuster

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• We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Party, Cutting, Agreement

  "Science and Linguistics" (1946)

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• Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Communication, Exhausted, Speakers

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• I admit that these terms and the diagrams connected with them repel some readers, and fill others with the vain imagination that they have mastered difficult economics problems, when really they have done little more than learn the language in which parts of those problems can be expressed, and the machinery by which they can be handled. When the actual conditions of particular problems have not been studied, such knowledge is little better than a derrick for sinking oil-wells erected where there are no oil-bearing strata.

  Alfred Marshall

  Oil, Imagination, Done

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• The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Nine, Helping

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1982). “Ronald Reagan”

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• Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different.

  Jean Aitchison

  Writing, Years, Vintage

  Jean Aitchison (2013). “Language Change: Progress Or Decay?”, p.14, Cambridge University Press

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• Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Communication, Next, Endure

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred R. Ferguson (1965). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume V: 1835-1838”, p.334, Harvard University Press

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• Love can be understood only "from the inside," as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.

  Robert C. Solomon

  Love, World, Speak

  Robert C. Solomon (1990). “Love: Emotion, Myth, & Metaphor”

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• I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

  Adrienne Rich

  Life, Respect, Believe

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• What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.

  Toni Morrison

  Sorry, Grief, Thinking

  "Toni Morrison: 'I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness'" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. April 13, 2012.

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• It is silly to call fat people "gravitationally challenged", a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

  Terry Eagleton

  Silly, Frustration, Self

  The Guardian, October 27, 1992.

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• To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.

  Eero Saarinen

  Men, Lines, Architecture

  Eero Saarinen (1962). “Eero Saarinen on His Work: A Selection of Buildings Dating from 1947 to 1964 with Statements by the Architect”, New Haven : Yale University Press

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• There seems to be an increasing awareness of something we Americans have known for some time - that the ten most dangerous words in the English language are "Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Helping, Awareness

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1991). “Ronald Reagan”

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• Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses - they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting.

  Frank Schoonmaker

  Wine, Piano, Smell

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• Marriage is the internationally recognised system of relationship recognition. It is the global language of love. When we were young, most of us dreamed of one day getting married. We didn't dream about having a civil partnership.

  Peter Tatchell

  Dream, Gay, Language Of Love

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