c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If you've never studied German before or think you know nothing about it, you might be in for a little surprise. You already know many German words .And you have the advantage of being an English speaker,which means that your knowledge of that language will be a helpful tool for learning German efficiently and comfortably.
— Edward Swick, The Everything Learning German Book: Speak, Write and Understand Basic German in No Time
Language itself is a major resource in the naming of what cannot be named
— David  Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration
Languages are not strangers to on another.
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?" - "When Our Lips Speak Together
— Luce Irigaray
The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.
— Jan Morris, Wales: The First Place
There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.
— Jack Lynch, The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park
We can only think in a language that we master.
— José Luis Ruiz, The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery
Your language indicates──and limits──what you think.
— Jonathan Price, Put That in Writing
This is an odd one. You have one country in the world where a word has a deeper meaning, it can really mess with design plans. ...But we have a difficult situation here so I guess we'll be looking at putting different sound chips in the dolls heading there [Britain].
— Todd McFarlane
When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.
— Maria Edgeworth, Helen
The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though, that there are some French words that I have picked up quickly, in fact, words that I cannot remember not knowing. As if I had been born with them in my mouth, as if they were seeds of a sour fruit that someone else ate and then ungraciously stuffed its remains into my mouth. 
— Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
— Walter Kirn
Language is power that gets abused all the time, Robin, but we've got real enemies out there somewhere and until they're out of the picture, I won't get knotted up over people who don't get all the words right. It's a waste of energy.
— Tim Eldred, Grease Monkey
In future, brainwave is a media of universal language.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance" -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- "fails.
— Myla Goldberg, Bee Season
Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back.
— Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone
The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.
— Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn
Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
— John McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care
I did not foresee my words becoming such a reverie of mimic and refrain.
— Joshua Kryah, Glean
No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.
— George Steiner, Real Presences
Weber sandstone a billion years old. This rock was Precambrian, I read, a term like postmodern, suggesting that what it names is so mysterious as to require identification by what it isn’t.
— Jim Paul, Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
...hear the language, this English, double-jointed as Bedivere's limbs. It only sounds awkward. In its ability to join one concept to another as with pegs, its dependent clauses, figures of speech and cadenced alliteration, a man can say one thing five ways and yet imply a sixth; can change meaning with an inflection, a pause or a deliberate misuse of a word, can mock, scorn and flay an opponent without uttering one overt insult.
— Parke Godwin, Beloved Exile
Language has infinite power and as long as there’s Romeo and Juliet or Laila and Majnu or You and Me, as long as there’s love in the world, language will find a way to cast its spell.
— Mallika Nawal
The arts vividly illustrate the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
— Rachelle Doorley, Tinkerlab: A Hands-On Guide for Little Inventors
When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry around with you, and slotted into place. That is not how a true native speak, one who is born into a language.’‘How does a native speak?’‘From the heart. Words well up within and he sings them, sings along with them. So to speak.
— J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man
The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.
— Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.
— M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains
I remember when I was a kid, seven years old maybe eight, I had an Irish girl who was taking care of us. Stereotypically named Maureen, about nineteen years old or twenty years old. She came upon me one day with my soldiers all set-up having a battle. Romans against Celts. She said, "Who's going to win?" I said, "The Romans are going to win, Romans always beat the Celts." She said, "Oh, really? What language are they currently speaking in Italy?" She says, "Bear in mind, back at home, we're still speaking the Irish. Of course, Irish, Gaelic, is a Celtic language, and you'll note that it ain't dead yet.
— Dan Carlin, The Celtic Holocaust
the most important things can't be lassoed with language. The most important things can only be felt.
— Megan Jacobson, The Build-up Season
Alan invented all sorts of ways of expressing things so that only he and I understood. He used language as a place for us to hide.
— Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders
Why is English so widespread today, and not Danish?
— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Where personal experience is concerned, we all speak a different language.
— Marty Rubin
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
— Emil M. Cioran
I have read in some of the old histories that in early times the Greeks did not know how to write until two men, one of whom was called Cadmus (Qatmus) and the other Aghanūn, came from Egypt bringing sixteen letters with which the Greeks wrote. Then one of these two men derived four other letters, also used for writing. Later, another man named Simonides (Simūnidus) derived four additional ones, making twenty-four. It was in those days that Socrates (Suqrātīs) appeared
— Ibn Al-Nadim
Death is only a translation of life into another language.
— Francis Marion Crawford
Our body talks to us, not in a language that you speak but the language that you feel
— Harrish Sairaman
The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.
— Ben Marcus, Notable American Women
LanguageCrickets chirp,Birds sing, Dogs howl,It's their own thing.Cats purr,Mice squeak,Cows moo,It's not what you think.Whales whistle,Dolphins click,Snakes hiss,So listen to this.Sheep baa,Rabbits twitch,If you can't speak,It's only a glitch.A body speaks,Their hands do wave,They're all speaking together,Now don't be so naïve.It's all a language,Which we don't hear,b\Because it's not our own,What do we care!
— Anthony T. Hincks
Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
— Waldo Emerson
The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time -- to start thinking in terms of projects.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.
— Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention
Owning Languages, Owning identities.
— Mahrukh
There was only one huge world with no back to itA world like a sunOne day it broke into tiny piecesThey were the words of the language we now speakPieces that will never come togetherBroken mirrors where the world sees itself shatterered
— Octavio Paz, Selected Poems
He never once repeated himself and he never used either profanity or obscenity. (I learned later that he saved those for very special occasions, which this wasn’t.) But he described our shortcomings, physical, mental, moral, and genetic, in great and insulting detail.But somehow I was not insulted; I became greatly interested in studying his command of language. I wished that we had had him on our debate team.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
This story, which takes place one a Sunday in July in a hot, deserted Lisbon, is the Requiem that the character I refer to as “I” was called on to perform in this book. Were someone to ask me why I wrote this story in Portuguese, I would answer simply that a story like this could only be written in Portuguese; it's as simple as that. But there is something else that needs explaining. Strictly speaking, a Requiem should be written in Latin, at least that's what tradition prescribes. Unfortunately, I don't think I'd be up to it in Latin. I realised though that I couldn't write a Requiem in my own language and I that I required a different language, one that was for me A PLACE OF AFFECTION AND REFLECTION.
— Antonio Tabucchi, Requiem: A Hallucination
Strong communicators increase their influence because they are intentional and focused with their language.
— Dianna Booher
Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western novels, for to him they were too bald, too self indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich. However they read in the original, he thought they reflected a taste that could not be translated into Japanese. Therefore, he had not the slightest intention of using imported phrases to develop his relationship with Michiyo. Between the two of them at least, ordinary words sufficed perfectly well. But the danger was of slipping from point A to point B without realizing it. Daisuke managed to stand his ground only by a hair's breadth. When he left, Michiyo saw him to the entranceway and said, "Do come again, please? It's so lonely.
— Sōseki Natsume, And Then
I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.
— Ann Medlock
From time immemorial, some men supposed to deal in one-valued 'eternal verities'. We called such men 'philosophers' or 'meta-physicians'. But they seldom realized that all their 'eternal verities' consisted only of words, and words which, for the most part, belonged to a primitive language, refleting in its structure the assumed structure of the world of remote antiquity. Besides, they did not realize that these 'eternal verities' last only so long as the human nervous system is not altered. Under the influence of these 'philosophers', two-valued 'logic', and the confusion of orders of abstractions, nearly all of us contracted a firmly rooted predilection for 'general' statements - 'universals', as they were called - which in most cases inherently involved the semantic one-valued conviction of validity for all 'time' to come.
— Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
English, although the official language of Nigeria, was a formal language with which strangers and non-relatives addressed you. It had the potency of digging craters between you and your friends or relatives if one of you switched to using it.
— Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen
There are several important remarks which can be made about this 'absolute emptiness' and 'absolute nothingness'. First of all, we now know, theoretically and empirically, that such a thing does not exist. There may be more or less of something, but never an unlimited 'perfect vacuum'. In the second place, our nervous make-up, being in accord with experience, is such that 'absolute emptiness' requires 'outside walls'. The question at once arises, is the world 'finite' or 'infinite'? If we say 'finite', it has to have outside walls, and then the question arises: What is 'behind the walls'? If we say it is 'infinite', the problem of the psychological 'walls' is not eliminated. and we still have the semantic need for walls, and then ask what is beyond the walls. So we see the such a world suspended in some sort of an 'absolute void' represents a nature against human nature, and so we had to invent something supernatural to account for such assumed nature against human nature. In the third place, and this remark is the most fundamental of all, because a symbol must stand for something to be a symbol at all, 'absolute nothingness' cannot be objective and cannot be symbolized at all. This ends the argument, as all we may say about it is neither true nor false, but non-sense. We can make noises, but say nothing about the external world. It is easy to see that 'absolute nothingness' is a label for a semantic disturbance, for verbal objectification, for a pathological state inside our skin, for a fancy, but not a symbol, for a something which has objective existence outside our skin.
— Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
I dug her usage of "Spotify" as a verb.
— Kara Lee Corthron, The Truth of Right Now
But language is malleable, and it is not always on the side of truth. This is something every writer knows. Words make and unmake the world with terrifying rapidity, and they do so without moral distinction…There is a battle going on right now over the words we use, over who has the right to speak and who does not. (Katie Kitamura)
— Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times
Wars have been waged over millions of square miles, significantly larger than the British Empire at its peak. Historically, Islamic conquests stretched from southern France to the Philippines, from Austria to Nigeria, and from central Asia to New Guinea. The Muslim goal was to have a central government, first at Damascus, and then at Baghdad, later at Cairo, Istanbul, and other imperial centres. The local governors, judges, and other rulers were appointed by the central imperial authorities for far off colonies. Islamic law was introduced as the senior law, whether or not wanted by the local people. Arabic was introduced as the rulers’ language, while the local languages frequently disappeared. Then, two classes of residents were established. The native residents paid a tax that their rulers did not have to pay. In each case, these laws allowed the local conquered people less freedom than was given to Muslims.
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
I always enjoyed studying languages and I learned from my Master that He wanted humans to be called Human Beings to continually remind them that they are really verbs and that their soul purpose is to BE. I think they tend to forget about this, they are so busy being nouns doing things that won't matter tomorrow.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult.
— Richard Dawkins, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.
— Billy Collins
To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions
How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions
The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don't go far enough; they don't have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don't stand for anything, push for anything; they're mere opportunists without dedication, and they don't win any victories.
— David Denby, Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits
The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal'ia'iou'amaa'aaa'eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night.
— Dave Barry, Dave Barry Talks Back
People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.
— John McWhorter, Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still
I will treat language with resigned delight, embrace it like unrequited love, offer words to you with a kind of secret shame, for I know that sometimes there is such a thing as too much language, and that language can hold a kind of sincerity that is tiresome and overwrought.
— Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World
Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.
— Lauren Collins, When in French: Love in a Second Language
A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.
— John Berger, Confabulations
Uh, she said maybe your eyes matched the Fog like a synchronous magnetic field?” “I don’t even know what language that is.
— Joel N. Ross, The Lost Compass
By sabotaging logic, the common frame of reference, and the common language, we have removed a "safety valve" that allows cultural divides to be resolved.
— Mike Klepper
before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signsthey enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an imageas much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave
— Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.
— John Berger, Confabulations
Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal
— John Berger, Confabulations
One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way
—  regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.
Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.
— Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person's culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person's culture. Anyone can learn "bawn-JURE" in a few seconds. To learn how bonjour fits your companion's mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion's -- this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistable gesture of care.
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number.
— Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
I know that language will be a crucial instrument, that I can overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouth.
— Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
Human spoken language seems to beadventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.
— Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
a hymn then not to birds but to words which themselves feel like feather and wing and light, as if it were on the delicacy of such sweet syllables that flocks take flight.
— Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.
— Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.
— Andrew Solomon
They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there. Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things
— Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World
How much have we not seen or felt or heard because there was no word for it -- at least no word we knew? We speak to navigate ourselves away from dark corners and we become, each one of us, cartographers.
— Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They that understand the meaning of language understand language and life better!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Language is where the tongue fails itself over & over again.
— Christopher Soto, Sad Girl Poems
Language lives in the mind, moves around with the tongue and gets its meaning in action!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
There's a world of difference between, "Look at this mess you made!" and "I don't like to see food on the floor!
— Joanna Faber, How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7
Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.
— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Our children's won't learn Kurdish Language fluently if we don't tech them.
— Davan Yahya Khalil
If you'd combat bigotry, use honest language and call things out for what they really are.
— DaShanne Stokes
Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.
— David Crystal, How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die
I was born with my voice in my hands.
— Kathryn Lomer, Talk Under Water
We live at the level of our language.
— Ellen Gilchrist
As you may follow, they are an extremely hostile species (i.e. there is no word for ‘welcome’ in the Ruminarii language.) In four short centuries they had managed to lay waste to almost a thousand star systems, enslaving their populations and stripping them of all they wanted.
— Christina Engela, Black Sunrise
The most satisfying of languages, Latin.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Her face looked for the answer that is always concealed in language.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Falling in love is like learning a whole new language and the culture that goes along with it. When you fall out of love it can be hard to pick up where you left off and start a new.
— Isabella Poretsis
The written word is what distinguishes us from all other animal life forms on this earth.
— Mommy Moo Moo
If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.
— James Rozoff
I am beginning to worry that my speech is becoming a rather incomprehensible mixture of a Victorian woman, an Australian Beach Bum and a Laddish city boy
— C.S. Woolley
Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.
— William H. Gass
Carmen's speciality is national news, and her greatest pleasure is finding inconsistencies in the declarations of politicians: syntactical errors, and – why not? – howlers. The one she has the most fun with is the mayor. Someone who can't speak shouldn't be in charge of a city, she's always saying. And, far from being elitist, her observation alludes to the obvious contempt a certain affluent social class – from which the mayor hails – feels for language (words, meaning, syntax, conjugation, use of prepositions, solipsisms) and which she, a secondary-teacher of language and literature for more than thirty years, refuses to countenance.
— Claudia Piñeiro, Betibú
Silence is the mother of all tongues
— Sudheer Reddy
What the devil is 'wordsharing'? Does the word for 'speak' mean 'listen' just as well? If I said, 'Listen to me!' you might talk, instead.""What use is the one without the other? It took me a long time to see this distinction in Valan speech."Spinel thought over the list of 'share forms': learnsharing, worksharing, lovesharing. "Do you say 'hitsharing,' too? If I hit a rock with a chisel, does the rock hit me?""I would think so. Don't you feel it in your arm?"He frowned and sought a better example; it was so obvious, it was impossible to explain. "I've got it: if Beryl bears a child, does the child bear Beryl? That's ridiculous.""A mother is born when her child comes.""Or if I swim in the sea, does the sea swim in me?""Does it not?"Helplessly he thought, She can't be that crazy. "Please, you do know the difference, don't you?""Of course. What does it matter?
— Joan Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean
To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life
Two demons: one who insists that what is to be inferred by verbal processes must correspond to experience
—  and one who 'insists that what cannot be arrived at by verbal processes cannot correspond to experience.
Jerkish". That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees - and there was no doubt (...) that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and the west, it would be the language of the future.
— Ivan Klíma
Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?
— Edith Wharton, The Verdict
Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write” Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write
— George Sand, Indiana
But the sheep had taught him something even more important: that there was a universal language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
To start speaking my language start reading what I read... start reading what I have written. Listen to what I have listened.
— Deyth Banger
Whenever the nature of the subject permits the reasoning process to be without danger carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in the contrary case it should be so constructed, that there shall be the greatest possible obstacle to a mere mechanical use of it
— John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation
The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
— C.S. Lewis
There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.
— Patrice Nganang, Mount Pleasant
I've tried to use sex in place of language, but no one yet has been capable of processing the imagery, references, and metaphors I imbue into my thrusts, so I've returned to common English.
— Jacqueline Novak, How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows
The language we use can subtly influence our thinking. […]On the face of it, the term “web platform” seems harmless. Describing the web as a platform puts it on par with other software environments. Flash was a platform. Android is a platform. iOS is a platform. But the web is not a platform. The whole point of the web is that it is cross‐platform.
— Jeremy Keith, Resilient Web Design
The degree to which language exactly mirrors reality is debatable.
— Rictor Norton, The Myth Of The Modern Homosexual: Queer History And The Search For Cultural Unity
Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on."I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least-at least I mean what I say-that's the same thing, you know.""Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!""You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!""You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!""It is the same thing with you." said the Hatter,
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The Almost Forgotten Human Language is ‘Feeling.
— Jasz Gill
I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.
— John DeFrancis, Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.
— George Orwell
, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round.""The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly."Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.
— Charles Williams, Descent into Hell
I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former
— Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully.
— Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
If I build own language... will be better because I always will end up making new words.
— Deyth Banger
Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair.
— André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs
Regardless of what language it is said in, "I love you" stays beautiful, and two hearts beating together make the same sound. It is the language of Love.
— Christina Engela, Black Sunrise
Sanskrit is a beautiful contextual language. It is called “Dev Bhasha” the language of the soul. Here, meanings of the words must come from the heart, from direct experience – dictionary meanings or static meanings have not much value. Meanings of the words vary depending on mind-set, time, location and culture. The words are made to expand the possibilities of the mind.
— Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being
He liked to address every man in his own language, as a good European should.
— H.G. Wells, Meanwhile or the Picture of a Lady
Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There ought to be a while separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words - for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.
— Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The way people want to get respect for their culture and language, it is critical to reciprocate the same to other else you don't have any right to condemn others
— Pankaj Gupta
Otaku (おた) is also a formal way of saying "you". た means "house", and with the honorific お, it literally means "your honorable house", implying that you are less of a person and more of a place, fixed in space and contained under a roof. Makes sense that the stereotype of the modern otaku is a shut-in, an obsessed loner and social isolate who rarely leaves his house.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Your language looks like a treasure map,' she said, 'if you forget all the rest of the letters and focus in on the x, it looks as if you could find out where the treasure is.
— Kirmen Uribe, Bilbao-New York-Bilbao
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
— Carl Sandburg
Siarad Cymraeg?" said Old Shacob."He wants to know if you speak Welsh," said the surveyor."NO!" yelled the official at the old man before him."Tamn it all; his language, man!" shouted Dan. "What you expect in Wales - Chinese, or what?!
— Geraint Goodwin, The Heyday in the Blood
I refuse to be linguistically constrained by dictionary writers.
— Amy E. Reichert, Luck, Love & Lemon Pie
If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
We each have our own language.Our own way of thinking, of talking to ourselves, of making sense of the world and putting it in order. A narration style that is ours and ours alone. That's why some of us connect and some of us don't. Because even though we can only live in our own heads, sometimes - every now and then - we meet a person we can talk to without speaking at all: whose story we can read, without even trying.
— Holly Smale, Sunny Side Up
Language was just that thing that happened when you opened your mouth at the table, squeezed a few noises out of your vocal chords, and induced Socrates thereby to pass the salt.
— Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars
One's identity derives not from one's nation or blood but from the language one uses.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
At the end of the second week they were still working and Arretapec, Conway and their patient were being talked, whistled, cheeped and grunted about in every language in use at the hospital.
— James White, Hospital Station
Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn't just to introduce new words (boi, cis-gendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly. Like when you whisper, You're just a hold, letting me fill you up. Like when I say husband.
— Maggie Nelson
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.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Those who live only in the universal temporality can make their voices heard by the world. Those who simultaneously live in the universal and particular temporalities may hear voices from the other side, but they cannot make their own voices heard.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
Of course, Kafka doesn't see himself as a sort of party. He doesn't even pretend to be revolutionary, whatever his socialist sympathies may be. He knows that all the lines link him to a literary machine of expression for which he is simultaneously the gears, the mechanic, the operator, and the victim. So how will he proceed in this bachelor machine that doesn't make use of, and can't make use of, social critique? How will he make a revolution?He will act on the German language such as it is in Czechoslovakia. Since it is a deterritorialized language in many ways, he will push the deterritorialization farther, not through intensities, reversals and thickenings of the language but through a sobriety that makes language take flight on a straight line, anticipates or produces its segmentations. Expression must sweep up content; the same process must happen to form... It is not a politics of pessimism, nor a literary caricature or a form of science fiction.
— Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
I am despised by an army of undiscerning academic highbrows, and ridiculed by semi-educated and vengeful "China-experts" whose era of translating Chinese into Western categories has now come to an end. The public is ready for non-European vocabularies.
— Thorsten J. Pattberg
The wisdom of the East is immortalized in its vocabularies and must be liberated from European language imperialism once and for all.
— Thorsten J. Pattberg
Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
— Karl R. Popper
My love translated sounds like a dead language.
— Salma Deera
Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.
— William Wordsworth
I’m talking about the language of flowers. It’s from the Victorian era, like your name. If a man gave a young lady a bouquet of flowers, she would race home and try to decode it like a secret message. Red roses mean love; yellow roses infidelity. So a man would have to choose his flowers carefully.
— Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers
I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
A related notion is that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn't think in any language. What people refer to as "thinking in a language" comes from being able to speak more immediately in a language without rehearsing it or translating it from a language one might know better; the spoken thought feels as if it's closer to its source in the brain.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples — neat and discrete — and more like oatmeal. It's always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite political pressures to name them as if they were marbles.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners