Language Quotes

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

Though language forms the preacher, 'Tis good works make the man.

This is the problem with language, and this is what makes silent movies fun, because the connection with them, me or the audience is not with the language. There's no question of interpretation of what we are saying it's just about feeling. You create your own story.

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.

I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn.

Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule. There isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another.

I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.

Even if you didn't see the movie, you'd see two words you'd never seen put together before - comedy and Muslim. Comedy is friendly - it's the least offensive word in our language.

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

I'm not called Jude Law, I have three names; I'm called 'Hunk Jude Law' or 'Heartthrob Jude Law'. In England anyway, that's my full name. That's the cheap language that's thrown around, that sums you up in one little bracket. It doesn't look at your life. But if one looks beyond, there is actually a little bit more.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

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

I met my grandfather just before he died, and it was the first time that I had seen Dad with a relative of his. It was interesting to see my own father as a son and the body language and alteration in attitude that comes with that, and it sort of changed our relationship for the better.

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

I am calling attention just to the main points of these tremendously important matters, which can be understood better by pious meditation than explained by human language.

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is 'not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.' That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me.

I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.