Quotations
'There's a lot of mathematics in music. It's all in groups of eight, mate, y'know. The one thing that I may have in common with John is that the subject matter I do know, the driving part of my life, my work life, there's a point where structure and scaffolding is left behind and intuition takes over. That's the difference between John and the next 100 mathematicians. He's fully prepared to leave the scaffolding behind and get into the ether of the equation and find the answer quicker. The bane of his existence, however, is finding the proof.'
Russell Crowe
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms
Penelope Lively
The language and concepts contained herein are guaranteed not to cause eternal torment in the place where the guy with the horns and pointed stick conducts his business
Frank Zappa
French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
Stephen King
Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.
Roman Jakobson
The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words
Hippocrates
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
Larry Wall
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Thomas Hardy
It is not enough for language to have clarity and content: it must also have a goal and an imperative.
Rene Daumal
He attempts to use language which he does not know
Persius
Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The lapse of ages changes all things - time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself.
Lord Byron
When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
John Donne
In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned. (Maxims, 1830)
Richard Duppa
Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
Language is the dress of thought.
Samuel Johnson
The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language
Werner Heisenberg
At the end of the day, flirting is a pretty universal language. Americans are more direct. British people are more indirect about everything
Rachel Weisz
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
My first language was shy. It's only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.
Al Pacino
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T S Eliot
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin
A vain, idle and sinful game at which there was much of the language of the accursed going on [on tennis]
James Hogg
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
James Baldwin
Dance is the hidden language of the soul.
Martha Graham
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
Gaston Bachelard
Even if people are suspicious of the motives I think that learning and speaking two languages can only be a good thing for people.
Stephen Harper
To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments nearly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from 'How shiny and beautiful they all are!' to 'Get that damned thing out of my mouth!'
Jaroslav Pelikan
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J G Ballard
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
Walt Whitman
[on understanding] The definition is this: to understand something is to know what it means, to know what its significance is. To understand a sentence is to know what it means, to understand a language is to know what its words and sentences mean, to understand a phenomenon more generally is to know its significance.
Tim Crane
Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.
Paul Goodman
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I do not understand.
Sir Edward Appleton
Two million dollars gate at one fight! That's some cabbage in any man's language.
Wilfrid Diamond
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
George Carlin
What language are you talking in now? It appears to be Bollocks.
Richard Wilson
Where nature's end of language is declined,
And men talk only to conceal the mind
Edward Young
We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.
Joseph Roux
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