Mother Tongue Quotes - Page 2

Symptoms are the body's mother tongue; signs are in a foreign language.

John Brown

Mother, Body, Tongue

Horae Subsecivae Series I, Introduction

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A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.

Garry Kasparov

Mother, People, Musician

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Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality.

Adolf Hitler

Mother, Dream, Struggle

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"What Thou wilt, when Thou wilt, how Thou wilt." I had rather speak these three sentences from my heart in my mother tongue than be master of all the languages in Europe.

John Newton

Christian, Mother, Prayer

John Newton, John Cecil (1831). “The works of the Rev. John Newton ...: containing, an authentic narrative, etc., letters on religious subjects, cardiphonia, discourses intended for the pulpit, sermons preached in the parish church of Olney, a review of ecclesiastical history, Olney hymns, poems, Messiah, occasional sermons, and tracts, to which are prefixed, Memoirs of his life, &c. by the Rev. John Cecil”, p.379

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... Who alive can say 'Thou art no Poet - mayst not tell thy dreams'? Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved, And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

John Keats

Mother, Dream, Art

John Keats (1914*). “The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats”, p.233, Рипол Классик

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[My mother tongue is] Albanian. But, I am equally fluent in Bengali (language of Calcutta) and English.

Mother Teresa

Mother, Tongue, Language

Source: mattersindia.com

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A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

W. H. Auden

Mother, Writing, Political

"Paris Review", Writers at Work, 4th series, (p. 251), 1972.

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After studying the Hungarian language for years, I can confidently conclude that had Hungarian been my mother tongue, it would have been more precious. Simply because through this extraordinary, ancient and powerful language it is possible to precisely describe the tiniest differences and the most secretive tremors of emotions.

George Bernard Shaw

Mother, Powerful, Years

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German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.

Franz Kafka

Mother, Hands, Movement

Franz Kafka (2013). “Letters to Milena”, p.26, Schocken

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When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

William Blake

Mother, Father, Sleep

'Songs of Innocence' (1789) 'The Chimney Sweeper'

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Every call to worship is a call into the Real World.... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.

Eugene H. Peterson

Mother, Prayer, Real

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Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Jeanette Winterson

Mother, Art, Thinking

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I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

Peter Høeg

Mother, Two, People

Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.316, Macmillan

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During all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East. From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue.

Philip Khuri Hitti

Mother, Islamic, Philosophical

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It needs more than ever to be stressed that the best and truest educators are parents under God. The greatest school is the family. In learning, no act of teaching in any school or university compares to the routine task of mothers in teaching a babe who speaks no language the mother tongue in so short a time. No other task in education is equal to this. The moral training of the children, the discipline of good habits, is an inheritance from the parents to the children which surpasses all other. The family is the first and basic school of man.

R.J. Rushdoony

Mother, Children, Teaching

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We're one race. No matter our religion, beliefs, mother tongue, or skin color.

Claudia Black

Mother, Race, Skin Color

"Claudia Black: Actor, Containment". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians.

Garry Kasparov

Mother, Games, People

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When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

Henry David Thoreau

Mother, Father, Writing

Henry David Thoreau (2006). “Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles”, p.13, Heron Dance Press

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All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world.

Hassan Blasim

Mother, Running, Children

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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When I was in south Sudan, people used to rap in my village. But the rapping was more in the mother tongue, Nuer.

Emmanuel Jal

Mother, Rap, People

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Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world

Amy Tan

Mother, Chinese, World

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Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

Peter Farb

Mother, Editors, Expression

Peter Farb (2015). “Word Play: What Happens When People Talk”, p.331, Vintage

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People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue.

Ken Robinson

Mother, Cutting, Technology

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I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.

William Tyndale

Mother, Truth, Eye

William Tyndale (1848). “Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures”, p.20

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I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mother, Reading, Book

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.103, Harvard University Press

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