Mother Tongue Quotes - Page 3

• Musical ability is not an inborn talent but an ability which can be developed. Any child who is properly trained can develop musical ability just as all children develop the ability to speak their mother tongue. The potential of every child is unlimited.

  Shinichi Suzuki

  Inspirational, Music, Mother

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• The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Book, Character

  Henry David Thoreau (1939). “Walden: or, Life in the woods”

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• Silence is become his mother tongue.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Mother, Silence, Tongue

  'The Good-Natured Man' (1768) act 2

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• Evangelicalism is like my religious mother tongue. I revert to it whenever I’m angry or excited or surrounded by other people who understand what I’m saying. And it’s the language in which I most often hear God’s voice on the rare occasion that it rises above the noise.

  Rachel Held Evans

  Mother, Religious, Voice

  Rachel Held Evans (2012). “A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband 'Master'”, p.18, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Welsh is my mother tongue, and my children speak it. If you come and live in this community you'll work out pretty quickly that it's beneficial to learn the language, because if you're going to the pub or a cafe you need to be a part of the local life.

  Bryn Terfel

  Mother, Children, Work Out

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• Friends started saying, "Oh, don't come. No vengas. It's dangerous for us, and we live here." Then there's also the issue, if you go back, and you happen to be Mexican-American, you get treated very differently [in Mexico] than if you're blond. If you say something wrong, they say, "Why don't you learn your mother tongue?"

  Sandra Cisneros

  Mother, Issues, Mexican

  "Talking in Our Pajamas: A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros on Finding Your Voice, Fear of Highways, Tacos, Travel, and the Need for Peace in the World". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. 2008.

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• Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mother, Art, Thinking

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• For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

  John Keats

  Mother, Dream, Art

  John Keats (2015). “The Complete Poetry of John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn + Ode to a Nightingale + Hyperion + Endymion + The Eve of St. Agnes + Isabella + Ode to Psyche + Lamia + Sonnets and more from one of the most beloved English Romantic poets”, p.758, e-artnow

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• The hardest thing is being with other people — it's like they're on a different wavelength, but only you know it. They talk about their lives and what's wrong with them, and you kind of, like, just let them go. It's a whole different language, and you've got to remember that you can only respond in their mother tongue. It's really hard to relate.

  J.R. Ward

  Mother, People, Different

  "Lover at Last: Number 11 in series".

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• I'm at the age when my friends have started having kids, and when my first good friend had a baby, the first time I picked up her daughter I spoke in French. I didn't even think about it. It just came out. Maybe it's because it's my mother tongue?

  Jessica Pare

  Mother, Daughter, Baby

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• The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

  Amin Maalouf

  Christian, Mother, Identity

  Amin Maalouf (2001). “In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong”, p.16, Arcade Publishing

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• Chess was Capablanca's mother tongue.

  Richard Reti

  Mother, Chess, Tongue

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• Will we allow the decline of our language-the language of Shakespeare, Shaw and Steinbeck? Will we abuse our precious gift of communication? Will we bite our mother tongue with the teeth of indifference, crushing the taste buds of clarity and, without prompt application of the antiseptic of education, causing the gangrene of strained metaphors? Stand up, America, and let me hear your answer: Ain't no way, dude!

  Mike Nichols

  Crush, Mother, Communication

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