Quotes on Language

The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

The purely formal language of geometry describes adequately the reality of space. We might say, in this sense, that geometry is successful magic. I should like to state a converse: is not all magic, to the extent that it is successful, geometry?

Learn your language well and command it well, and you will have the first component to life.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

Not the ones speaking the same language, but the ones sharing the same feeling understand each other.

The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel once. I'm bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.

Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

When you travel you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don't even understand the language the people speak....You begin to be more accessible to others, because they may be able to help you in difficult situations.

It is through our hands that we speak to the child. That we communicate. _x000D_ Touch is the child's first language, understanding comes long after feeling

The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time--- is he who shall create poems in stone.

Tears are the noble language of the eye.

I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.