Quotes on Language

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the nature of God and the nature of man.

I think of language as our first music.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences...Language and knowledge are indissolubly connected; they are interdependent. Good work in language presupposes and depends on a real knowledge of things.

We communicate all the time, even when we don't realize it. Be aware of body language

Besides language and music, mathematics is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind.

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection - most dreams are bungled - the are symbolic chains of scene and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed when we remember our dreams.

We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss. This language is laden with future catastrophes. The day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.