Language Understanding Quotes

“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”
― Goethe

“Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.
-Aunt Beast”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“Let us dedicate this new era to mothers around the world, and also to the mother of all mothers -- Mother Earth. It is up to us to keep building bridges to bring the world closer together, and not destroy them to divide us further apart. We can pave new roads towards peace simply by understanding other cultures. This can be achieved through traveling, learning other languages, and interacting with others from outside our borders. Only then will one truly discover how we are more alike than different. Never allow language or cultural traditions to come between brothers and sisters. The same way one brother may not like his sister's choice of fashion or hairstyle, he will never hate her for her personal style or music preference. If you judge a man, judge only his heart. And if you should do so, make sure you use the truth in your conscience when weighing one's character. Do not measure anybody strictly based on the bad you see in them and ignore all the good.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood.”
― Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

“De todos los idiomas europeos el que resulta más difícil de hablar bien a mi entender es sin duda el español, tal es su riqueza de palabras, rotaciones lingüísticas y belleza expresiva. Ocurre sin embargo que tan pocas personas conocen lo que dicen, son tan escasas las que manejan por completo el inmenso vocabulario de esta excepcional lengua, tan selectas las que entienden sus innumerables giros y tiempos verbales, que parece simple y sencillo a primera vista.”
― Antonio Cavanillas De Blas, El médico de Flandes

“I was pretty good at picking up new languages when I was little, but it's not like I had superpowers or anything.

Kids just have an easier time with words.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 4

“The Arabian obsession with the beauty of their language had ironically blinded them to its core purpose. Their poets were masters of rhetoric who failed to inspire action in real life, having reduced their heritage to fancy yet hollow words. Their audiences were fanatically devoted to proper diction— ready to impulsively plunge a dagger over an inadvertent wrong term—yet otherwise wallowed passively in stagnation. Unable to access the latent wisdom encoded in their language, Arabs failed to act as masters of their own fate.”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy

“Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name’s the mother
of the ten thousand things.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way

“Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Facing a language you don't know is like returning to your infancy when your mother tongue used to be a foreign language to you”
― Munia Khan

“If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.”
― Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Yang lebih penting dari bertutur kata baik adalah bertutur kata dengan tepat.”
― Ziggy Zezsyazeoviennazabrizkie, Di Tanah Lada

“Les mots ont un sens, nommer c'est comprendre”
― Jean-Baptiste Andrea, Veiller sur elle

“Hablar bien, expresarse correctamente en español, no es conocer mil palabras y vomitarlas machaconamente; supone el conocimiento preciso de cada término, su raíz filológica, el empleo justo de cada vocablo en el momento adecuado evitando redundancias, hipérboles y prolongaciones del discurso que, de otra forma, deviene pesado y pedantesco.”
― Antonio Cavanillas De Blas, El médico de Flandes

“If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“NEVER allow the enemy to define your terms. If you want to win a war of propaganda, you must be able to manipulate language to expose the truth.”
― Jenifer Mohammed, Resurrecting Cybele

“So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.”
― Steven Pinker

“We all have struggle in our lives. We're all searching for personal freedom, whether we're in a bad place or trying to be true to ourselves.”
― Barbara Becker Holstein

“The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.”
― Munia Khan

“They started the meeting out by saying, "Everybody please take your seats"
I was halfway back to my cubicle with mine before they stopped me...”
― Neil Leckman

“German is for learning while English is for entertainment only.”
― Laura Chouette

“If you wanna know about a culture, you can read about it in any language - but if you want to experience that culture like your own, you gotta do it as one of their own - through their own native language.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“That which is alike will be called same. That which is not same is different.”
― Leonard Bloomfield

“Language is a kind of miracle in itself. It is amazing that beings would have the appropriate ingredients, both mentally and physically, to construct elaborate sounds and signals that can express ideas about the natural word.”
― Eric Overby

“Reality is our god, and the language for its supernatural communication is math.”
― Marcel Eschauzier, Without Opposite: A Philosophical Adventure

“A Keyring Turns The Map Time Out Inna Ramadali's Gift...”
― Jonathan McKinney

“Frente a nuestras narices, todo esos lenguajes complejos que no sabemos interpretar. Podemos observar una cosa una docena de veces y pensar qué bonito, o qué raro, hasta que un día inesperadamente siempre le encontramos sentido,”
― Doris Lessing, Gatos ilustres

“In a world where words are often mere amusement, it is imperative to forge a new dictionary that enlightens the masses on the true worth of spoken words. For those who underestimate its power, fail to realize the energy they emit and the consequences they yield. What we give with our words, we receive - a universal balance that demands understanding and respect.”
― Yvonne Padmos

“My mother can hold her own where foreign words are involved. The simple duo-syllable 'croissant' comes out variously as 'craw-sank', 'crass-ant', or 'crah-sint', the word seeming to have no business being in her mouth and getting spat out as quickly as possible like a bad oyster.”
― John Niven, O Brother

“...the term "philomath" (of Greek origin) meaning "lover of learning and study.”
― Mary Jo Gohlke, A Lady's Place