c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
..all subjects are forms of discourse and that, therefore, almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is a language describing and interpreting events, according to rules established by historians. Astronomy is not planets and stars but a special way of talking about planets and stars, quite different from the language poets use to talk about them.
— Neil Postman
Well,’said Ernest, ‘by some strange coincidence I know this story.’Boddichek was not good at irony. ‘I knew that there was that possibility,’ he said, ‘but we have a great new way to treat it, and I thought you might want to reread it before taking a meeti
— Jonathan Lynn, Mayday
Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.
— Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The standard modern measurement for inebriation is the Ose system. This has been considerably developed over the years, but the common medical consensus currently has jocose, verbose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose, adios.This is a workable but incomplete system, as it fails to take in otiose (meaning impractical) which comes just after jocose. Nor does it have grandiose preceding bellicose. And how they managed to miss out globose (amorphous or formless) before comatose is beyond me.
— Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language
Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.
— Mary Norris, Between You  Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
The alternative is to locate large deposits of specifically what we need, and extract it in bulk from the earth.”“That’s mining,” said the Drip. “There is a twenty-third century legend that youth was conscripted to work in mines. Anyhow, all young people were known as miners at one period.
— Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume III: Killdozer!
So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.
— Mary Norris, Between You  Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Comment sections on the internet are like gang graffiti, abusive words sprayed like gibberish and it's ugly to look at.
— Michael P. Naughton, Deathryde: Rebel Without a Corpse
Toxemia. A word that starts so harsh and ends so gently.
— Emma Hooper, Etta and Otto and Russell and James
To understand Jesus Christ, you must know the Language of Heaven.
— Felix Wantang, God's Blueprint of the Holy Bible
As Richard has pointed out on several occasions, I subscribe to the irregular verb theory of life: I am a trained investigator, you have a healthy curiosity, she/he is a nosy parker.
— Val McDermid
They’re not fat pigs
—  we’re mad scientists.
The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.
— Daryl Gregory, Afterparty
The physicist had no time to waste on a symbol
—  his concern was with what the symbol denoted. To the typesetter the symbol and its denotation were bound in an organic unity. There was a meaning to the symbol itself which only the typesetter could appreciate.
Day starting with a smile leads you to that place where even imagination is quite hard. Smile and make your day bright since the beauty of smile is priceless and its a language that all the people around world can understand.
— Sakin Maharjan
Fuck words, nothing spokencomprehends the defiantly ephemeral.I take my incompleteness with the rest, an exilein any language.
— Eric Gamalinda, Amigo Warfare
Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.
— Laurence Overmire
You can lie in any language on earth, and body language is no exception.
— Nenia Campbell, Cease and Desist
Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely understands (then at least) by a circle something different from what mathematicians understand. Similarly, when men err in calculating they have certain numbers in their mind and different ones on the paper. So if you consider what they have in mind, they really do not err, though they seem to err because we think they have in their mind the numbers which are on the paper. If this were not so, we would not believe that they were erring, just as I did not believe that he was erring whom I recently heard cry out that his courtyard had flown into his neighbor's hen, because what he had in mind seemed sufficiently clear to me.And most controversies have arisen from this, that men do not rightly explain their own mind, or interpret the mind of the other man badly. For really, when they contradict one another most vehemently, they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.
— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.
— John McWhorter, Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars
That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.
— Michael  Callahan, Searching for Grace Kelly
Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She's said a tearful good-bye to okay some time ago.
— Lisa Genova, Still Alice
Well... "why" is a hard question to answer in any language.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
The ancient Hebrews did not write the name of God. I often wish the Christians would follow suit, as never was a word more misused in writing and speaking than the name of the Lord.
— Dagobert D. Runes, A Dictionary of Thought
They spoke in semaphore, all punctuation unnecessary.“You?”“Great.”They’d trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.
— Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder
She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.
— David Anthony Durham, Acacia: The War with the Mein
The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.
— T. Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville
Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known cure, but doctors have been working on it, and may get back to working on it sometime soon.
— Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language
Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.
— Andrew Solomon
Grammarians make no new thoughts, but thoughts make new grammar.
— Dagobert D. Runes, A Dictionary of Thought
The best grammarian still can't write a verse.
— Dagobert D. Runes, A Dictionary of Thought
Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!
— Barry  Webster, The Lava in My Bones
In language, I discern words that fail to signify what they denote and do not adequately convey their meanings. The word happiness seeks its meaning in people and in their yearnings and their desires, while people seek the meaning of happiness in the word and in its definitions and its truths. It may well be that the meaning of the word lies discarded somewhere beneath the sun in a neglected corner of an obscure village, or in the shelter of a sycamore tree, or sleeping under a bale of cotton taken as a temporary roof, or sitting and laughing in a neighborhood gathering, or standing to contemplate the current of a stream, or stretched out and gazing up at the heavens.
— مصطفى صادق الرافعي
The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.
— Anton Chekhov, The Bet and Other Stories
Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
— Paul Goodman
the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.
— Lenore Kandel, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel
Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.
— Lenore Kandel, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel
There are so many words in our language
—  we get to know so few of them.
Languages, symbols and universals do not change, they cannot by virtue of what they – thus, with the passing of the Ages, Tradition does not change, but the form in which it decides to manifest does – thus some religions succeed whilst others fail and become extinct. Tradition itself can never cease to exist, but the religions which are its voice perish with the rise and fall of civilizations
— Gwendolyn Taunton, Primordial Traditions Volume One
Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.
— Eduardo Galeano
Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it. Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording. The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life.
— Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood
Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. The minute we speak we are in that fiction. It’s a fiction designed, we hope, to reveal a truth. There is no “pure” language. The only “pure language” is the initial sounds of a baby. All of us lose that purity, and as we get more “of” the world, we even lose sometimes the capacity to keep that breath moving in our language.
— Anne Deavere Smith
We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment that they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It’s the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it’s a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They’re digging deep and projecting out at the same time. […] The idea is that the psychology of people is going to live right inside those moments when their grammar falls apart and, like being in a shipwreck, they are on their own to make it all work out.
— Anne Deavere Smith
Like language, I think any who have not acquired spirituality by a certain age are doomed to be never fluent and you are likely to mimic the one that surrounds you.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
I take the words I can get and try to occupy them. Using the idea that my grandfather gave me — “If you say a word often enough it becomes you” — I borrow people for a moment, by borrowing their words. I borrow them for a moment to understand something about them, and to understand something about us. By “us,” I mean humans.
— Anne Deavere Smith
Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.
— Anne Deavere Smith
Language has created a barrier that prevents us from seeing existence as it truly is.
— Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times
Yet from time to time we are betrayed by language, if not in the words themselves, in the rhythm with which we deliver our words. Over time, I would learn to listen for those wonderful moments when people spoke a kind of personal music, which left a rhythmic architecture of who they were. I would be much more interested in those rhythmic architectures than in the information they might or might not reveal.
— Anne Deavere Smith
Some people use language as a mask. And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not.
— Anne Deavere Smith
We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "this part shouldn't have happened." That is, we've left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story's actions.So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself.
— John Green
Language is a serious weapon in shining and sharing Truth. It is also a serious weapon used in its distortion.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.
— Carl Sagan, Contact
Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity
— Bill Bryson
It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.
— Walter M. Miller Jr.
Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today’s heritage and our new compositions to the future.
— M. Fethullah Gülen, Speech and Power of Expression: On Language, Esthetics, and Belief
I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.
— George Bernard Shaw
The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…
— Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments
I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the other hand, is just a command to ‘go do’.
— Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
Speak English!" said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!" And the Eaglet bend down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests.
— Henry Hitchings
Nations that can manage to develop their language and make it accommondating while at the same time staying faithful to the roots of it are the most communicative societies that are also most dynamic in thought.
— M. Fethullah Gülen, Speech and Power of Expression: On Language, Esthetics, and Belief
The smartest people can write the worst emails and those of less intellect can write the best.
— Paul Babickii
Language is a social energy, and our capacity for articulate speech is the key factor that makes us different from other species. We are not as fast as cheetahs – or even as horses. Nor are we as strong as bulls or as adaptable as bacteria. But our brains are equipped with the facility to produce and process speech, and we are capable of abstract thought. A bee may dance to show other bees the location of a source of food, a green monkey may deliver sophisticated vocal signals, and a sparrow may manage as many as thirteen different types of song, but an animal's system of communication has a limited repertoire; ours, on the other hand, is 'open', and its mechanisms permit a potentially infinite variety of utterances.
— Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English
A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!
— Mehek Bassi
To make a simple change of a typeface can instantly transform text which had the appearance and tone of a joyous announcement to suddenly convey that of a somber tragedy.
— Paul Babicki, Netiquette IQ: A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email
Language also acts like love in form.
— Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange
What if, right now, as we’re immolating language, we’re doing away with ourselves? Maybe we’ve regressed. The skills we once used for survival – scattered attention, diffuse concentration – have been adapted to finding glowing dots on screens, skimming pop-ups, beams, emails, video streams.
— Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange
I don’t think I have as many friends as I thought I did, not close ones, not many who I connect with on that deep level of language that doesn’t just allow us to be ourselves with each other but allows us to be understood, even when we’re not saying anything.Silence—awkward or comfortable—is a language too. Awkward silence screams, “We have nothing in common.” Comfortable silence proves just how much we do.
— Erin McCahan, Love and Other Foreign Words
He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.
— Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer
Poetry helps heal wounds.Makes them tangible.At the poetry reading I reada poem.A prophecy I wrote down. Almost couldn't go through with it.But it came outhurried and hotand by the endmy tongue was on fire.
— Isabel Quintero, Gabi, a Girl in Pieces
Words tend to last a big longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear - flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands - and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.
— Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things
Music is the language of the universe, which everyone, including all animals, can understand.
— Debasish Mridha
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived it socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.
— Mikhail Bakhtin
And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme.
— Michel Foucault
Language is a door. Words en-trance and are an entrance; they draw you in. When you read, the book you cradle disappears and the tales within unfold in your mind. Writing is a shelter of words and reading an interior adventure.
— Laurie Seidler, 22 Shelters: Lessons From Letters
A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.
— Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
The Holy Bible is the Spirit of God exposed to humanity in the Language of Heaven.
— Felix Wantang, Face to Face Meetings with Jesus Christ 2: Preparing for God's Paradise
Who could trust language?
— Anne Rice, The Wolf Gift
It's not about the language, it's about the message
— Goitsemang Sandra Mvula
Most adults have a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, meaning that children must learn 10 to 20 words a day between the ages of eight months and 18 years. And yet the most frequent 100 words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4000 words account for 98% of conversation.
— David Miller
A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.
— Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
Raymond collected expressions. He repeated them in experimental accents, as if learning a tune. He sounded like an Eighteenth Street Mexican when he said cuate, like a Logan Square cubano when he said comemierda.
— Sebastian Rotella
Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.
— Gene Wolfe
The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.
— Lorrie Moore
Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep pace with those hectic geometers, and slap names on all the whorls and snarls in the pages of the Doctor's geometry-books.
— Neal Stephenson
Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112)They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity?
— Gilles Deleuze
Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about
—  you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.
I have a disease
—  I see language.
The language, feminine desires to speak, and her first phrase to express her love to him - *blush*
— Saravana Kumar Murugan
The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine," for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over.
— Hakim Bey
You all right?" he said again.I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was."Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.
— Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.
— Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
The polyglot is a linguistic nomad.
— Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects
Who hasn't been told "love you?" I don't put much stock in such words because it's the "I" that gives "love you" its true essence and intimate meaning, so unless someone can bring themselves to say "I love you," don't subtract from the significance by saying something less.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I was not born with English in my pocket.
— Santosh Kalwar, Conceptualizing and measuring human anxiety on the Internet
No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.
— Peter Slezak
I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.
— Mark Twain
My parents would not permit ugly language in the house, which was okay with me. I didn't want to learn German anyway.
— Alex Bosworth, Chip Chip Chaw!
Oftentimes, people meet our writing before they meet us; our writing is our ﬁrst impression.People read our résumés, cover letters, proposals, and emails, and that's the basis on which we are judged ﬁrst. If our writing is full of grammar and punctuation errors, even though the content may be great, it’s like wearing a beautifully made Prada dress that has deodorant stains
— Jenny Baranick, Kiss My Asterisk: A Feisty Guide to Punctuation and Grammar
Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.
— Zia Haider Rahman
You may think that you don't need to worry about actually learning the grammar rules because spell check and grammar check will come to your rescue. And I get it: spell check and grammar check are great. Every time I spot a red or green line in my writing, I check it out, and many times, although I hate to admit it, I have made a mistake. But spell check and grammar check are like vodka: they are deﬁnitely helpful but shouldn't be solely relied on to solve our problems.
— Jenny Baranick, Kiss My Asterisk: A Feisty Guide to Punctuation and Grammar
I want you to learn right at the outset not to play with the spoon before you take the medicine. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Procrastination is the longest word in the language, but there’s only one letter between its ends when they occupy their proper places in the alphabet.
— George Horace Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
If one is talking about a vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language
—  one is less likely to be seduced into excusing it.
The nature of poemsIs a matter of words and deedsAn intimate encounter of voiceIn the ache of the heartIn the labor of breathingA hesitant casting of eyesAway from the mundane to seeThat delicate and shiny thingIn the oddly prosaic rock pileAn extravagance of conceitAn abundance of graceA prayer for words to speak
— Kendall Dana Lockerman, Rain
During the Reformation and the Enlightenment, nature came to be understood in a mechanistic sense as bereft of any capacity for divine grace or revelation. We’ll explore this suggestion further in the next chapter. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak of nature, we are using language to describe the world around us with all its species, life-forms and landscapes. But nature is a concept whose meaning changes with different perceptions and ways of looking at the world. This means that supernatural is also a concept which has different meanings, for it refers to phenomena or experiences which do not seem to fit within our particular expectations of what nature is or should be. The term supernatural therefore depends on a certain concept of what natural is. For many people who are less determinately materialist than Dawkins, there may be an indeterminate region which is neither strictly natural nor strictly supernatural. A red rose may be natural, but when I am given one by the person I love, I experience a range of emotions, memories and associations which endow that rose with symbolic significance and make it, in some sense, supernatural. It transcends its natural biological functions to communicate something in the realms of beauty, hope and love.
— Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason & the War on Religion
They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Thank you,’ I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.” (169).
— Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.
— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Each asana is like a sound or letter in an alphabet. Every letter in an alphabet produces a unique sound vibration. Each asana vibrates at a specific frequency. When asanas are performed in sequence, beautiful phrases or sutras result, producing a mystical language.
— Sharon Gannon, The Art of Yoga
Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.
— Octavio Paz
We believe that information is an enlightening agent, but I can assure you it is not. We consume information, but we can’t read. We forgot how to sit down and engage the dense layers of a text. We are so busy devouring information that we forgot how to dance with ideas. We confuse linguistic bits of data for knowledge and ideas. I can assure you, gentlemen, they are not the same. Ideas require effort and the kind of sensibility that engages the subtle layers of meaning. What the hell does information require?
— R.F. Georgy, Notes from the Cafe
I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.
— Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories
You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Learning a language is not interesting than knowing how it works.
— Ritesh Shrivastav
Sex is a matter of biology, while gender is a matter of grammar, and there is no earthly reason why sex should be involved in gender distinctions.
— R.L. Trask, Language: The Basics
I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship.
— Fiona Maazel, Last Last Chance
Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and events in great part shaped by the very language in which we describe them? When we try to describe one person to another or to a group, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job -- no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being.
— Cleanth Brooks, The Language of the American South
To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.
— Gregory C. Carlson, Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says about You
Words in the head are sticky and social creatures – when you finally pull one out, you're liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their palling around with other words.
— Gregory C. Carlson, Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says about You
Man acts as though he were the sharper and the master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
— Heidegger, Martin
In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in themselves, but only insofar as they constitute evidence that permits one to determine fundamental features of the real world, within a course of inquiry that is invariably undertaken under sharp idealizations, often implicit and simply common understanding, but always present.
— Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.
— Lily King, Euphoria
Dad says there are more than three thousand letters in the Japanese alphabet, which could pose a problem. There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and I get into enough trouble with them as it is.
— Rin Chupeco, The Girl from the Well
The stars have their own language, you know. If you're careful, you can learn it.
— Sarah Jio, The Last Camellia
The worst kind of oppression is when the victims think and talk in the language of their oppressors.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.
— John Dolan, Everyone Burns
Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur
To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.
— Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance
When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others--using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.
— Charlotte Lamb, Night Music
Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.
— Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
Every writer dreams of a perfect language. Every writer dreams of a language that obeys, that comes to heel. For some this language is spare and pure, pared down to reveal essential truths without ornament or obfuscation. For others it is devilish and twisting, folding back over itself to create layers of meaning, shades of nuance.A language that will survive through the ages.A language that will crack open the heart of readers like a hazelnut.
— Helen Marshall
Music is the great unifier. It doesn’t matter which country you’re in or what language is being spoken, the fans just magically seem to get it. They share a common goal of love and celebration for the purity of magnificence and brilliance that has been created by the artist. It’s transcendent. It’s inspiration. It’s raw emotion. It’s communication – a perfect marriage of notes, harmonies, lyrics and melodies. It’s the beauty within the beast.
— J.M. Nevins
I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.
— Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening
He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
I had a dream about you last night... we tried to joke but neither could make any sense. We realized that puns are present in every language, though not shared by any of them.
— Marshall Ramsay, Dreaming is for lovers
Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun - all those exciting verbs that don't come unit the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.
— Libba Bray, Going Bovine
Language, because it is imperfect, cannot encompass experience in its raw and primal condition. To verbalize emotion and action is to decrease their impact.
— Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature
The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.
— John Sinclair
Sometimes we speak different languages, but our hearts are the same.
— Mykyta Isagulov
The language of nature is silence.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
I'm online, therefore I am.
— Stewart Lee Beck, China Simplified: Language Gymnastics: A springboard into Chinese culture
The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.
— Benny Lewis, Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World
English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.
— Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans
If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you're not jovial but miserable and saturnine that's a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or misplaced planet. Disaster is Latin for ill-starred.The fault, as Shakespeare put it, is not in our stars; but the language is.
— Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of 'Mary Jane' for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember.
— Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
A bar, as any good dictionary will tell you, is a rod of wood or iron that can be used to fasten a gate. From this came the idea of a bar as any let or hindrance that can stop you going where you want to; specifically the bar in a pub or tavern is the bar-rier behind which is stored all the lovely intoxicating liquors that only the bar-man is allowed to lay is hands on without forking out.
— Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
Spanish—how shall I say this?—is likePortuguese spoken with a speech impediment.
— Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening
We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.
— William S. Burroughs
He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.
— Kate Atkinson
Language has been mobilised and sent into battle; it directs the human carnage of conflict with its enunciation of emotion, stimulating souls to abandon peace.
— Daniel S. Fletcher, Jackboot Britain
What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It’s almost a paradox that you’re seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn’t have language for it.
— Stuart Dybek
We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you're an ass.
— Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange
You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre (Night's Dream, #2)
English is not merely a language anymore
—  it has become a way of life for millions of non-native English speakers around the world.
What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.
— Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
(on the word "fuck")'Oh, come on, Mum,' I sighed at her protest. 'It's just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It's the same as "fuck", it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because copulate has its roots in Latin and Latin reminds us that we are a sophisticated, learned species, not the rutting animals that these prehistoric grunts would have us appear to be, and isn't that really the issue here? We don't want to admit that we are essentially animals? We want to distinguish ourselves from the fauna with grand conceits and elaborate language; become angels worthy of salvation, not dumb creatures consigned to an earthly, terminal end. It's just a word, Mum; a sound meaning a thing; and your disgust is just denial of a greater horror: that our consciousness is not an indication of our specialness but the terrifying key to knowing how truly insignificant we are.'She told me to got fuck myself.
— Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well
...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional “victims” who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.
— Gad Saad
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language