Language Quotes - Page 39

• The most important words in the English language are not 'I love you' but 'it's benign.'

  Woody Allen

  Love You, Important, Benign

  Deconstructing Harry, www.imdb.com. 1997.

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• Speaking in tongues is as normal to me as 'Pass the salt' It's a secret, direct prayer language to God.

  Katy Perry

  Prayer, Secret, Tongue

  "Katy Perry's Preacher Mom Disagrees With Daughter's Career Choices", www.foxnews.com. March 16, 2011.

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• You may buy from me in your own language, but sell to me in mine.

  Willy Brandt

  May, Mines, Sells

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• The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

  Chinua Achebe

  Different, Peculiar, Use

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• It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.

  John Humphrys

  Vocabulary, Years, Sms

  "I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language" by John Humphrys, www.dailymail.co.uk. September 24, 2007.

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• You see, in our family we don't know whether we're coming or going - it's all my grandmother's fault. But, of course, the fault wasn't hers at all: it lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement.

  Amitav Ghosh

  Grandmother, Journey, Going Away

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• Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.

  Carl Jung

  Real, Echoes, Essence

  Carl Gustav Jung (1956). “Symbols of transformation”

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• Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Punishment, Doe

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• Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

  Allan Bloom

  Communication, Greek, Special

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

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• It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

  Uta Hagen

  Ideas, Interpretation, Static

  Uta Hagen (1991). “Challenge For The Actor”, p.46, Simon and Schuster

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• Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries.

  Clifford Odets

  Country, Cheer, Music Is

  1937 Mr Bonaparte. Golden Boy, act1, sc.2.

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• The intellectual is called on the carpet... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Cutting, Men, Intellectual

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.196, Routledge

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• Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.

  Jurgen Habermas

  Disappointment, Political, May

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• Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

  Martin Heidegger

  Home, Men, Thinking

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• Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.

  Hannah Arendt

  Vocabulary, Grammar, Crucial

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• All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third.

  Julius Caesar

  Three, Celts, Thirds

  Julius Caesar (2014). “The Gallic Wars”, p.3, Simon and Schuster

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• Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

  Robert Fitzgerald

  Character, Ears, Pages

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• Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way.

  Robert Fitzgerald

  Art, Principles, Different

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• Even when people can't speak your language,
  they can tell if you have love in your heart.

  Pat Nixon

  Heart, People, Speak

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• Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

  William Carlos Williams

  Different, Use, Demand

  William Carlos Williams' detail and prosody for his poem "Paterson" given to James Laughlin (now at Houghton Library), 1939.

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• The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

  William Carlos Williams

  Heard, Idiom, Offers

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• If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Humility, Perspective, Isolation

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• A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Ancient, States, Inevitable

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• In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!

  Ivan Turgenev

  Country, Powerful, Fate

  Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Elizabeth Cheresh Allen (1994). “The essential Turgenev”, Northwestern Univ Pr

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• The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Country, Book, Years

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