Language Quotes - Page 26

• Richard Burton had a tremendous passion for the English language, especially the spoken and written word

  Frank Bough

  Funny, Passion, Dumb

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• If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature.

  Steven Weinberg

  Law, Religion, Atheism

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• Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you.

  Dane Rudhyar

  Sky, Astrology, Speak

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• Let us not be unmindful that liberty is power, that the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth. Our Constitution professedly rests upon the good sense and attachment of the people. This basis, weak as it may appear, has not yet been found to fail. Always vote for a principle, though you vote alone, and you may cherish the sweet reflection that your vote is never lost. America, in the assembly of nations, has uniformly spoken among them the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights.

  John Quincy Adams

  Sweet, Powerful, Blessed

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• Body language is essential for an actress, even if you don't use your body in an athletic way. Just to be free, to use it like your voice. A body can be small and have incredible violence. A body talks.

  Anne Parillaud

  Voice, Athletic, Essentials

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• When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!

  William Halsey

  Memorial Day, Military, War

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• It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology.

  Niels Kaj Jerne

  Children, Mean, Science

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• Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

  Eric Allin Cornell

  Travel, Character, Interesting

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• I am annoyed by individuals who are embarrassed by pauses in a conversation. To me, every conversational pause refreshes.

  George Sanders

  Communication, Annoyed, Individual

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• Part of what makes a language 'alive' is its constant evolution. I would hate to think Britain would ever emulate France, where they actually have a learned faculty whose job it is to attempt to prevent the incursion of foreign words into the language. I love editing Harry with Arthur Levine, my American editor-the differences between 'British English' (of which there must be at least 200 versions) and 'American English' (ditto!) are a source of constant interest and amusement to me.

  J. K. Rowling

  Wise, Witty, Jobs

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• Color is a language, like music.

  Vlady Kibalchich Russakov

  Color

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• 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

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• Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Art, Hands, Ideas

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• Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer.

  William P. Alford

  Writing, Thinking, Simplicity

  "A Plea for the Queen's English? RU joking?" by Dan Cook, www.theguardian.com. December 9, 2010.

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• Human rights without responsibility, without a sense of decency, a sense of compassion, is not good enough for a society to flourish... We need to broaden our scope from the legalistic language to the language of the heart.

  Tu Weiming

  Heart, Responsibility, Compassion

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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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• [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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• I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us towards the ultimate reality.

  Morris Graves

  Reality, Quality, Mysterious

  Harvard Review, Issues 20-21, p. 26, 2001.

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• The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

  Hugo Ball

  Real, Views, Long

  Hugo Ball (1974). “Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary”, p.104, Univ of California Press

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• The phosphorous smell which is developed when electricity (to speak the profane language) is passing from the points of a conductor into air, or when lightning happens to fall upon some terrestrial object, or when water is electrolysed, has been engaging my attention the last couple of years, and induced me to make many attempts at clearing up that mysterious phenomenon. Though baffled for a long time, at last, I think, I have succeeded so far as to have got the clue which will lead to the discovery of the true cause of the smell in question.

  Christian Friedrich Schonbein

  Success, Couple, Fall

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• Abstraction is an esoteric language.

  Eric Fischl

  Esoteric, Painting, Abstraction

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• Horses in the Book of Mormon would be another. You have relatively few mentions of horses, but there are some, and we don't know exactly how they were used; they don't seem to be all that common. Were they horses as we understood them, [or] does the term describe some other animal? Languages don't always and cultures don't always classify things the way we would expect. We have what we call common-sense ways of doing it. They're not common sense; they're just ours. But again, we don't have a strong case there. We're just problem solving there.

  Daniel C. Peterson

  Strong, Horse, Honesty

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• 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.

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• Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

  Virginia Woolf

  Expression, Giving, Sound

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• Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Writing, Defining, Framework

  'Thinking in Primitive Communities' in Hoyer (ed.) 'New Directions in the Study of Language' 1964

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