Language Quotes - Page 22

• 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)

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• The belief that words have a meaning of their own account is a relic of primitive word magic, and it is still a part of the air we breathe in nearly every discussion.

  Charles Kay Ogden

  Air, Magic, Belief

  9 Copy quote

• The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.

  Eugene Wigner

  Expression, Law, Simplicity

  18 Copy quote

• I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Keys, Special, Literature

  12 Copy quote

• Saddam Hussein also challenged President Bush to a debate. The Butcher of Baghdad vs. the Butcher of the English language.

  Jay Leno

  President, Hussein, Baghdad

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• Through radio I look forward to a United States of the World. Radio is standardizing the peoples of the Earth, English will become the universal language because it is predominantly the language of the ether. The most important aspect of radio is its sociological influence. (1926)

  Arthur E. Kennelly

  Science, Important, United States

  5 Copy quote

• In the long run, the replacement of the precise and disciplined language of science by the misleading language of litigation and advocacy may be one of the more important sources of damage to society incurred in the current debate over global warming.

  Richard Lindzen

  Running, Long, Important

  8 Copy quote

• Many expressions that are in common usage, and sometimes the structure of language itself, reveal the fact that people don't know who they are. You say: "He lost his life" or "my life," as if life were something that you can possess or lose. The truth is: you don't have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy. Can you sense deep within that you already know that? Can you sense that you already are That?

  Eckhart Tolle

  Stars, Animal, Expression

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “Stillness Speaks”, p.53, New World Library

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.

  Frederick Buechner

  World, Speak, Holy

  4 Copy quote

• Then they ask, "Do you want Jesus to come into your heart?" Does it bother anyone that this formula or language is not found in the New Testament?

  Paul Washer

  Jesus, Heart, Doe

  73 Copy quote

• In this way they went on, and on, and on-in the language of the story-books-until at last the village lights appeared before them, and the church spire cast a long reflection on the graveyard grass; as if it were a dial (alas, the truest in the world!) marking, whatever light shone out of Heaven, the flight of days and weeks and years, by some new shadow on that solemn ground.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Book, Reflection

  Charles Dickens (1872). “Works of Charles Dickens”, p.123

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  15 Copy quote

• A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture.

  Charlie Waite

  Photography, Cutting, Political

  54 Copy quote

• 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”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Communication, Long, Example

  "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid". Book by Douglas Hofstadter, 1979.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

  Barbara Holland

  Communication, Needs, Painful

  Barbara Holland (2010). “Secrets of the Cat: Its Lore, Legend, and Lives”, p.25, Harper Collins

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Communication, Revolutionary, Rebellious

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.148, University of Chicago Press

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

  Joseph Joubert

  Writing, Glasses, Fine Words

  11 Copy quote

• Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.

  Eric Bentley

  Communication, Ideas, Age

  New Republic 29 Dec. 1952

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.

  Bruno Barbey

  Photography, Understanding, World

  65 Copy quote

• Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion.

  John Amos Comenius

  Views, Diversity, Humanity

  75 Copy quote

• It's a secret language, known to all different people, in different ways, that enables them to read a subliminal message without realising they're reading it. It affects people on many levels, and even people who think they're not into fashion, or reject fashion are then being informed just in the case of rejecting it. The fact that they had to react against it was a conscious decision.

  Louise Wilson

  Fashion, Reading, Thinking

  "Remembering Louise Wilson OBE". AnOther Interview, origin.anothermag.com. May 17, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source