Language Quotes

“As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.”

“From antiquity, Latin died but is still studied in seminaries and elite universities. So did Sanskrit in Asia. iI was replaced by Pali, but even Pali died, too. Linguists say the only ancient language which was resuscitated from the grave was Hebrew of Israel.”

“In order to become a master, you need to emulate. If you're going to be as big as Warhol has become in art, then you have to have younger generations who are exploring your work and trying to understand it like a language.”

“Comedy is a universal language. I grew up watching Nagesh, Surilirajan, Thenga Srinivasan and S.V. Shekhar's comedies. And, of course, Charlie Chaplin! These artists are so blessed: they can make other people happy.”

“The only language I feel I'm perfectly fluent in is English. It's the language I grew up studying, thinking in and the one I'm most comfortable in when expressing myself. My Hindi is also quite good, but outside English and Hindi, I wouldn't consider myself to be fluent in any other language.”

“Never invite someone who is speaking a foreign language in your presence to "Go back to your country." The only time that phrase is every acceptable is if you are British and you are speaking to Madonna.”

“Shakespeare's taught me that there are more words in the English language than I have got in my head.”

“I remember people saying that Atletico wanted me, that they are a big team, and that it will be a big challenge for me. I don't know why, but I just felt really prepared for it, really confident. I went there and tried to do my best in training as well as learn the language really quickly. That was important, I think.”

“Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.”

“Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.”

“Anger is the fire of the soul, love is the language of the heart ...”

“The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind this density resides an even greater density – beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is. (...)This perspective should in many ways be seen as undercutting some of the contrasts between theological liberals and conservatives. The former tend to validate what they see as the modern embrace of our finitude – as language, and as erotic and aesthetically delighting bodies, and so forth. Conservatives, however, seem still to embrace a sort of nominal ethereal distancing from these realities and a disdain for them. Radical orthodoxy, by contrast, sees the historic root of the celebration of these things in participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that premodern tradition never took this celebration far enough. The modern apparent embrace of the finite it regards as, on inspection, illusory, since in order to stop the finite vanishing modernity must construe it as a spatial edifice bound by clear laws, rules and lattices. If, on the other hand, following the postmodern options, it embraces the flux of things, this is an empty flux both concealing and revealing an ultimate void. Hence, modernity has oscillated between puritanism (sexual or otherwise) and an entirely perverse eroticism, which is in love with death and therefore wills the death also of the erotic, and does not preserve the erotic as far as an eternal consummation. In a bizarre way, it seems that modernity does not really want what it thinks it wants; but on the other hand, in order to have what it thinks it wants, it would have to recover the theological. Thereby, of course, it would discover also that that which it desires is quite other than it has supposed”

“We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking - all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.”

“Of village: it is not called so because its inhabitants are of higher age on average; in fact, there is no connection between the words “village” and “age” whatsoever.”

“So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.”

“Ever since I was a kid, I just loved those comedians on TV who would just have fun with the language.”

“We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is “woking.”

“Music is not supposed to be nationalist. It is supposed to surpass language barriers. It is about generations communicating with each other.”

“He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat”

“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”