Language Quotes - Page 23

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

  Eugene Wigner

  Expression, Law, Simplicity

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• 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

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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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• 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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• 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

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• 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

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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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• 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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• 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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• To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

  George Eliot

  Inspirational, Knowing

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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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• Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Book, Reality, Psychics

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• The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood.

  Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

  Philosophy, Cutting, Science

  Presidential Address to Classical Association, 1959.

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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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• No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

  Aubrey Beardsley

  Communication, Rude, Polite

  Aubrey Beardsley (1921). “Under the Hill: And Other Essays in Prose and Verse”

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• 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

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• 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

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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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• 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 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.

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• He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Inspiration, Learning, Knowing

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2012). “The Goethe Treasury: Selected Prose and Poetry”, p.293, Courier Corporation

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

  Frederick Buechner

  World, Speak, Holy

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• Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Writing, Piano, Novelists

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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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