Quotable Quotes About Language

180 quotes found; sorted by most recent
Topic Writer Quote Source
words John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
listening Chief Dan George It is useless for people to hear if they do not listen with their hearts.
listening Jimi Hendrix Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
speaking Desmond Tutu's father Improve your argument -- don't raise your voice.
silence Baha'u'llah The essence of true safety is to observe silence, to look at the end of things, and to renounce the world.
language Derrida There is no clear window into the inner life of a person, for any window is always filtered through the glaze of language, signs and the process of signification.
models Jon Courtenay Grimwood Even a poor penman will become substantial in the art of calligraphy if he studies by imitating a good model and puts forth effort.
literature Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848) the solid treasures have buoyed themselves up amidst the wrecks of nations
literature Milan Kundera The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
words Sir Aurobindo Yet eternity and infinity seemed but words Vainly affixed by mind's incompetence To its stupendou lone reality. The world is but a spark-burst from its light, All moments flashes from its Timelessness, All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless That disappear from Mind when Time is seen.
writing Bob Dylan The songs are the star of the show, not me. ... It’s like a ghost is writing a song. It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means. I’m not thinking about what I want to say,” he told Mr. Hilburn. “I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter? - interview with Robert Hilborn LA Times
writing Wu Chengen As a matter of fact, blank scrolls such as these are the true scriptures.
expression Michael M. (from Facing History High School) This semester I learned that expressing myself is a very important skill.
writing Jim Lampson "Handwritten lyrics ""are one of the most desirable items in rock and roll memorabilia,"" auctioneer Jim Lampson said."
silence Bob Dylan Sometimes the silence can be like the thunder (from Love Sick)
speech Laura Frances Within a culture of capitalism, words are power because they embody speech, which is the means of communication that connects and maintains the position of a select group of dominant speakers.
stories Jeanette Winterson The stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life, and leave the rest in darkness. You don’t need to know everything. There is no everything. The stories themselves make the meaning.
mindset Robert Pirsig The place to improve the world is first in one's own head and heart and hands and then work outward from there.
art Bill Reid Art can never be understood, but can only be seen as a kind of magic, the most profound and mysterious of all human activities. Within that magic, one of the deepest mysteries is the art of the Northwest Coast -- a unique expression of an illiterate people, resembling no other art form except perhaps the most sophisticated calligraphy.
poetry Will Bee What you need when you are perpetrating sonnets, is not a poetic license, but plenty of bail money.
language Ben Johnson to observe, To quote, to learn the language, and so forth—
reading Zadie Smith Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park.
blog Sean M. Burke My ideas here are neither original nor earthshattering, but I figure it might be interesting/useful for somebody on the list here, so I'm rounding them up for your amusement:
forms Yule, G and Brown, G On the few occasions where constructed data is used as illustration (of a paradigm, for example, in Chapter 4), it is inevitably directed towards accounting for the range of formal options available to a speaker or writer.
polarity ? The task, therefore, is to merge the Eastern and Western processes into a new paradigm that will unleash the creative potential and 'free-up'; innovative activities while focusing on unified goals of the organization.
practical Warnock, Mary We have to recognize that education must satisfy the needs of its pupils (a highly un-Platonic idea), and that in the case of some children, not necessarily the least able, their needs will be best met by allowing the balance to tip in the direction of the practical.
silence Young, Malcolm Silence continues to sustain the hegemony, and social change only occurs when irresistible and more powerful forces are brought to bear from outside
polarity Whitford, M and Griffiths, M. Basingstoke: Theorists have constantly and explicitly used antitheses such as active/passive, reason/emotion, form/matter, mind body, autonomy/dependence as weapons in this supposed war, recommending their own ideals by directly claiming that the contrary ones were typical of women.
polarity T.S. Eliot? It was almost, I ventured to suggest as if the agnostic were declaring `;Lord, I want to believe, but please cosset my unbelief, because the resulting tension is so delicious';.
gen sys theory Chalmers, A F. A mature science is governed by a single paradigm.
oratory Shakespeare For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
writing Ryszard Kapuscinski Not so long ago I was asked to a town outside Warsaw to give a reading. It was scheduled to begin at five o'clock, and I arrived about half an hour early. But it was impossible to get in. The hall was packed. In fact, it was so packed that no one, with so many people squeezed up against the door-frame, was able to get out. By the time I succeeded in reaching the podium, I had been crushed and pressed and pulled by so many bodies that all my buttons had popped off. My shirt was torn, and I had lost my glasses. At around five-thirty, I began reading.
writing Ryszard Kapuscinski You can always find two versions of my work. The first version is what I do when I'm in the field: it's all in the cables, the stories filed. The second version is what I write later, and that expresses what I actually felt, what I lived through, the reflections surrounding the simple news story. You know, a press cable is a very conservative medium for conveying news. We are always limited: by the number of words, by the time we can get on the machine, by the money, by the information that the newspapers back home want to receive. But the realities we face, especially in the Third World, are so much richer, more complicated, than a newspaper will ever allow us to report.
language William Burroughs Language is a virus from outer space...
writing Ryszard Kapuscinski It illustrated that writing was about risk—about risking everything. And that the value of the writing is not in what you publish but in its consequences. If you set out to describe reality, then the influence of the writing is upon reality.
writing Leo Tolstoy A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
writing Xah Lee Once upon a time there was Diary, and similar were logs, journals, travelog and such forth. In our info age, it is called blogs by inept computing geeks. (blogs = web logs). To keep in sync with humanity of fashionable business and nomenclature novelty, mine is called Periodic Dosage. This periodic, is bent on to inform the informed, and educate the educated, of all things and social things and anthropological things.
writing Pablo Neruda I want them all to live through my life, to sing through my song I am not important I have no time for my own affairs, night and day I must write down whats happening,
polarity Martin Luther King Jr. "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word \""tension.\"" I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so much we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic ehights of understanding and brotherhood."
writing Bob Dylan I cant tell you why other people write, but I write in order to keep from going insane. my head, I expect'd turn inside out if my hands were t leave me. ... but I hardly ever talk about why I write. an I scarcely ever think about it. the thought of it is too alarmin
sentences Bertrand Russell Substance is a metaphysical mistake due to transference to the world-structure of the structure of sentences composed of a subject and a predicate.
blogs Fred Wilson AVC Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading your blog needs to be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like on YouTube. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading your blog needs to be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like on YouTube. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what I think is happening in the technology, Internet, and venture capital markets.
blogs Fred Wilson AVC A blog is a conversation. It needs to be current and fresh. I hate going to a blog and seeing the same post at the top I saw last time. I want to be rewarded for the visit with something new.
blogs Fred Wilson AVC In addition if I gave up the discipline of writing every day, there's a chance I'd never write again. Its a habit, a hobby, and its therapy of a sort. I don't feel complete if I haven't written at least once a day. My blog is like a public diary. I am writing as much for myself as anyone else, probably way more for myself to be honest.
blogs Fred Wilsom AVC I also think posting every day leads to a larger audience. I don't really know because I've never tried it any other way. But evidence suggests that the more posts per day on a blog, the more traffic it gets. Of course its not clear what is cause and what is effect. Maybe more traffic encourages more posts.
metaphor Orson Scott Card Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
storytelling Hannah Arendt Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
writing William Wordsworth Fill the paper with the breathings of your heart.
writing James Michener I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
writing Dr. Barbara Walvoord Writing is so complex an activity, so closely tied to a person's intellectual development, that it must be nurtured and practiced over all the years of a student's schooling and in every curricular area.
poetry Gordon, George (Lord Byron) I've half a mind to tumble down to prose, but verse is more in fashion --- so here goes.
language unknown nonameorform It is the quality known as rasa, a quality that flashes out suddenly, that will link us with Bhartrihari and Shankara. Abhinavagupta describes this in his Dhvanyaloka, 1.4, as '..it can never be an object of direct word definition'. Although rasa is recognized and accompanied by enjoyment it is not to be limited to that. So he writes: 'Aesthetical enjoyment is produced not only by poetic words but rather by the removal of obstacles coming from blinding darkness generated by confused ignorance (moha). We agree that aesthetical enjoyment is akin to the joy of (recognizing oneself as) the higher Brahman.' Locana 2.4 We may parapharase Abhinavagupta as saying that rasa is 'the delectable savouring of the Self by the Self'. This is the sweetest of tastes that the poet Hrishikesha describes as 'a fusion of both word and meaning which bathes the minds of readers with oozings of bliss. It is the truth of poetry, shining without cessation. Clear to the heart, it is yet beyond words.'
language Sir Winston Churchill Short words are best, and old words when short are the best of all.
language unknown The meaning of the sentence, the speech-unit, is one entire cognitive content (samvit). The sentence is indivisible (akhanda) and owes its cognitive value to the meaning-whole. Thus, its meaning is not reducible to its parts, the individual words which are distinguished only for the purposes of convention or expression. The differentiated word-meanings, which are also ontological categories, are the abstracted pieces we produce using imaginative construction, or vikalpa. Sphota entails a kind of mental perception which is described as a moment of recognition, an instantaneous flash (pratibh), whereby the hearer is made conscious, through hearing sounds, of the latent meaning unit already present in his consciousness (unconscious). The sentence employs analyzable units to express its meaning, but that meaning emerges out of the particular concatenation of those units, not because those units are meaningful in themselves. We analyze language by splitting it up into words, prefixes, suffixes, etc.but this is indicative of the fact that we misunderstand the fundamental oneness of the speech-unit. Words are only abstracted meaning possibilities in this sense, whereas the uttered sentence is the realization of a meaning-whole irreducible to those parts in themselves. This fundamental unity seems to apply, also, to any language taken as a whole. Matilal explains: it is only those who do not know the language thoroughly who analyze it into words, in order to get a connected meaning. As this scholar suggests, it is rather remarkable that Bhartrihari's recognition of the theoretical indivisibility of the sentence resonates with the contemporary linguistic view of learning sentences as wholes (at a later stage of development we build new sentences from learned first sentences through analogical reasoning).
language Bhartrihari (Hindu philosopher and poet-grammarian see the Vakyapadiya ("Words in a Sentence"), regarded as one of the most significant works on the philosophy of language, earning for him a place for all time in the sabdadvaita (word monistic) school of Indian thought.
poetry Macbeth, George in a glittering, intense traffic jam of brilliant ideas [speaking of Yeats]
silence Sri Aurobindo Silence is all, say the sages Silence watches the work of the ages; In the book of Silence the cosmic Scribe has written his cosmic pages; Silence is all, say the sages. What then of the word, O speaker? What then of the thought, O thinker? Thought is the wine of the soul and the word is the beaker; Life is the banquet-table - the soul of the sage is the drinker. What of the wine, O mortal? I am drunk with the wine as I sit at Wisdom\'s portal, Waiting for the Light beyond thought and the Word immortal. Long I sit in vain at Wisdom\'s portal. How shalt thou know the Word when it comes, O seeker? How shalt thou know the Light when it breaks, O witness? I shall hear the voice of the God within me and grow wiser and meeker; I shall be the tree that takes in the light as its food, I shall drink its nectar of sweetness.
methodology Chaucer I never studied rhetoric, that's certain; That which I say, it must be bare and plain.
forum Silverstein, Shel Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless Christmas dinner's dark and blue When you stop and try to see it From the turkey's point of view.
writing Benjamin R. Barber As survivors of aging print technologies, books are relics of a slowly vanishing culture of the word - democracy\'s indispensible currency and a faltering bulwark against the new world of images and pictures flashed across screens at a speed that thwarts all deliberation.
writing Benjamin R. Barber As wordsmiths yield to imagineers, literate private readers and deliberative public citizens alike are made to feel like endangered species.
image Benjamin R. Barber You are in front of or in or on MTV: universal images assault the eyes and global dissonances assault the ears in a heart-pounding tumult that tells you everything except which country you are in.
language Barrett, Grant What Is A Word? Below I use word to include term or phrase. This is consistent with an academic definition of word, which might be explained as [quote]a self-contained part of language, made of one or more morphemes, recognized by its speakers to represent a single idea or unit, several of which together can form a sentence.[unquote] A word is not necessarily a string of characters uninterrupted by a space.
language Barrett, Grant Sometimes I include a word just because I like its sound, its ring, its rhythm, its context, the way it jabs out of a sentence, its layered meanings, its chutzpah.
writing Benjamin R. Barber Where then do books belong in our videoland helter-skelter? They belong not at all - unless they acquiesce to assimilation and takeover and become one more genre in the infotainment service telesector's commercial culture, what we call teleliterature.
writing Sri Aurobindo A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,
speaking Benjamin R. Barber If, as Ignatieff has it, [the key language of our age is ethnic nationalism,] then the key to ethnic nationalism is language. In Western Europe's gnetle Jihad, language is how the parts detach themselves from the whole. It is not only Americans who worry about a primary or mother language. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, provincials have rediscovered language (dialect) and made it the talisman of their reawakened cultural subnationalism, leaving modern French patriots to wonder what will be left of France if it is carved back up into its Norman and Breton and Basque parts.
speaking Benjamin R. Barber People on the Net do prattle on about the community, but when have they last spoken to a neighbor? If good fences make good neighbors, virtual neighbors make good fences - against real neighbors.
words Ashok K. Ganguli The words, if looked at from the point of view of their external formation, seem to be mere physical sounds which [a device of the mind has made to represent certain objects and ideas and perceptions] but from the point of view of their inmost psychological aspect, [we shall see that what constitutes speech and gives it its life and appeal and significance is a subtle conscious force which informs and is the soul of the body of sound: it is a superconscient Nature-Force raising its material out of our subconscience but growing conscious in its operations in the human mind that develops itself in one fundamental way and yet variously in language.]49 It is this superconscient Force, [the goddess of creative Speech] that [acts in us through different subtle nervous centres] on various levels. Thus the word has a graduation of its expressive powers of truth and vision. If this idea of [different degrees of the force of speech] is recognised and accepted, then can be explained the various degrees of word-force characteristic of prose speech as well as of the poetic. In prose the word-force [avails ordinarily to distinguish and state things to the conceptual intelligence]; while [the word of the poet sees and presents in its body and image to a subtle visual perception in the mind awakened by an inner rhythmic audition truth of soul and thought experience and truth of sense and life, the spiritual and living actuality of idea and object]49, explains Sri Aurobindo; this is what he calls [the seeing speech of the seeing mind].
image Benjamin R. Barber Information has been digitalized and computerized and the pace of communication has been accelerated, but sound and pictures are how what passes as [quote]knowledge[unquote] gets [quote]communicated[unquote] to most people around the globe. ...These images, reinforced by recorded sound, take the place of words, numbers, and other ciphers with which humans have traditionally communicated. The abstraction of language is superseded by the literalness of pictures - at a yet to be determined cost to imagination, which languishes as its work is done for it; to community, which is bound together by words; and to public goods, which demand the interactive deliberation of rational citizens armed with literacy.
English Benjamin R. Barber In McWorlds terms, the queens English is little more today than a highfalutin dialect used by advertisers who want to reach affected upscale American consumers. American English has become the world's primary transnational language in culture and the arts as well as in science, technology, commerce, transportation, and banking.
speech Bhartrihari It is not armlets that adorn a man, nor necklaces all cramped with moon bright pearls, nor baths, nor ointments, nor arranged curls. Tis art of excellent speech that only adorn him: Jewels perish, garlands fade, this only abides and glittery undecayed .
silence Nick Brooke One inspiration is Javanese rhythms which is totally a subtext in my work. Actually, if you look at those pieces they've all got a steady beat, but sometimes it's this far out [raises arms spread wide] and you can't perceive it - the whole piece is constructed roller coaster-like, so each time you go around the spin it's got to be a tighter curve. That I do partially with silence and the expectation of silence. The silences in certain places have to be very exact, which is why it's really hard to perform my work.
travel Edwardseco Just a little effort with language in travel expresses so much friendship.
language Larouche, Lyndon The kernel of the issue of literacy in language is central on the development and employment of the individual person's divine spark of creative reason for the functions of generating, communicating, and assimilating effciently conceptions equivalent to valid, fundamental, revolutionary advances in a practical science and technology.
speaking Zappa, Frank The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
writing Forbes, Malcolm Putting pen to paper lights more fire than matches ever will.
writing Shan, Chung-chieh [interesting discussion on technical aspects of writing a paper]...
words Galsworthy, John When God is so good to the fields, of what use are words¡ªthose poor husks of sentiment There is no painting Felicity on the wing No way of bringing on to the canvas the flying glory of things[exclamation mark) A single buttercup of the twenty million in one field is worth all these dry symbols¡ªthat can never body forth the very spirit of that froth of May breaking over the hedges, the choir of birds and bees, the lost-travelling down of the wind flowers, the white-throated swallows in their Odysseys.
words Dylan, Bob And every one of them words rang true And glowed like burnin' coal Pourin' off of every page Like it was written in my soul from me to you
language Wittgenstein, Ludwig The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
literature unknown Ultimately, literature is aesthetically valued, regardless of language, culture, or mode of presentation, because some significant verbal achievement results from the struggle in words between tradition and talent. Verbal art has the ability to shape out a compelling inner vision in some skillfully crafted public verbal form.
literature unknown Of course, the differences between the written and oral modes of expression are not without consequences for an understanding of Native American literature. The essential difference is that a speech event is an evolving communication, an [quote]emergent form[unquote], the shape, functions, and aesthetic values of which become more clearly realized over the course of the performance. In performing verbal art, the performer assumes responsibility for the manner as well as the content of the performance, while the audience assumes responsibility for evaluating the performer\'s competence in both areas. It is this intense mutual engagement that elicits the display of skill and shapes the emerging performance. Where written literature provides us with a tradition of texts, oral literature offers a tradition of performances.
writing Billings, Josh The grate art in writing well, iz tew kno when tew stop.
reading Philip Pullman Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter. [new paragraph] And we are active about the process. We are in charge of the time, for example. We can choose when to read; we don't have to wait for a timetabled opportunity to open the covers; we can read in the middle of the night, or over breakfast, or during a long summer's evening. And we're in charge of the place where the reading happens; we're not anchored to a piece of unwieldy technology, or required to be present in a particular building along with several hundred other people. We can read in bed, or at the bus stop, or (as I used to do when I was younger and more agile) up a tree. [new paragraph] Nor do we have to read it in a way determined by someone else. We can skim, or we can read it slowly; we can read every word, or we can skip long passages; we can read it in the order in which it presents itself, or we can read it in any order we please; we can look at the last page first, or decide to wait for it; we can put the book down and reflect, or we can go to the library and check what it claims to be fact against another authority; we can assent, or we can disagree. [new paragraph] So our relationship with books is a profoundly, intensely, essentially democratic one. It places demands on the reader, because that is the nature of a democracy: citizens have to play their part. If we don't bring our own best qualities to the encounter, we will bring little away. Furthermore, it isn't static: there is no final, unquestionable, unchanging authority. It's dynamic. It changes and develops as our understanding grows, as our experience of reading - and of life itself -increases. Books we once thought great come to seem shallow and meretricious; books we once thought boring reveal their subtle treasures of wit, their unsuspected shafts of wisdom. [new paragraph] And we become better readers: we learn different ways to read. We learn to distinguish degrees of irony or implication; we pick up references and allusions we might have missed before; we learn to judge the most fruitful way to read this text (as myth, perhaps) or that (as factual record); we become familiar with the strengths and duplicities of metaphor, we know a joke when we see one, we can tell poetry from political history, we can suspend our certainties and learn to tolerate the vertigo of difference. [new paragraph] Of course, democracies don't guarantee that real reading will happen. They just make it possible. Whether it happens or not depends on schools, among other things. And schools are vulnerable to all kinds of pressure, not least that exerted by governments eager to impose "targets", and cut costs, and teach only those things that can be tested. One of the most extraordinary scenes I've ever watched, and one which brings everything I've said in this piece into sharp focus, occurs in the famous videotape of George W Bush receiving the news of the second strike on the World Trade Centre on 9/11. As the enemies of democracy hurl their aviation-fuel-laden thunderbolt at the second tower, their minds intoxicated by a fundamentalist reading of a religious text, the leader of the free world sits in a classroom reading a story with children. If only he'd been reading Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, or Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad, or a genuine fairy tale. That would have been a scene to cheer. It would have illustrated values truly worth fighting to preserve. It would have embodied all the difference between democratic reading and totalitarian reading, between reading that nourishes the heart and the imagination and reading that starves them.
writing Alexander Pope True ease in writing comes from art, not chance As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
conversation Bill Bryson All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety - and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larnyx - or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it - and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.
silence Betty J. Eadie The is power in our thoughts. We create our own surroundings by the thoughts we think. Physically, this may take a period of time, but spiritually it is instantaneous. If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words we create our own weaknesses and strengths.
language Martin Heidegger Language is the center of our being.
context Bill Gates Humans are good at two things that the computer is not yet good at. One is background noise elimination, and the other is context. That is, knowing things based on who you're talking to, knowing what they said before, of all the ambiguous possible things that they might have said it can resolve, whereas the computer foolishly would pick the wrong thing. This is called the 'wreck a nice peach' problem because if you say to a computer, 'recognize speech', it will sometimes say wreck a nice peach', but if you understood the context you might say that that was a pretty silly thing. So, consciously, your mind is eliminating all kinds of silly ambiguities. If you take a noise-free chamber and you do just random words, there is no context. The difference between humans and computers today is about of a factor of two, and we know how to get rid of that. Then we have to do the noise elimination and context. And we're investing... this is one of the things where - yes - people should be skeptical because people have got up on stage and said this before. In our case, and we're putting our money where our mouth is, so to speak, in that we're investing at record levels in these breakthrough technologies on that roadmap.741258.html
silence Samuel Avital My grandfather once told me that when we are born we were given a certain number of words in our word bank. If one uses too many words (like over spending too much) it empties our word bank account, they become overdrawn, or we become mute. So, when we use words only when necessary we practice word economy. My grandfather's words made a very great impression on me as a young boy, no doubt contributing to my decision to make my life work in the Theater of Silence. Words are only one of the ways to communicate; 99% of our real communication, however, occurs in silence, through your body language. I highly recommend to practice one day of silence a week to achieve the ability to speak less and do more and produce more and consume less -- practicing consistently the practical wisdom of the Word Economy.
reading Ben Okri Reading too is a magic operation, a translation, an act of mental creation, or miscreation. An interpretation. A connection. All reading, he felt as he stared into the labyrinth of the pages, is the cahllenge of magnifying what is silent in the text. It is reading with an inner magnifying glass. Reading what is there and not there. Reading the margins, the gaps, the spaces between the lines and between the words. Reading the punctuation, the ellipses. The invisible words too. Or else, reading is passive. And so reading is a hymn to the challenge of the imagination and the intelligence, humanity, and sensitivity of the one who reads. They make the world within the words greater or smaller. But the artist shapes and compresses and hides the signs that spring from their coiled places, and makes them capable of such magnification when the reading mind is open to them and meets them with commensurate creativity. Reading well is as creative and as rare and as rewarding as writing well. And Lao felt that the world was much like that too. Life, the world, society, reality, history is a sprung text that we endlessly learn how to read better. Experience is a living text written in ourimmortal memories thatwe endlessly learn how to read better. Some signs are harder to read, and we need to learn more to be able to understand them. Some texts dwell in disguise, and we misread them, or don't see them at all. And others live in quiet hiding, among the simplest things, and yet they are connected to the most profound things of life. How alive and how free and how englishtened one must be to be able to read the texts of living and the text of books
writing Ben Okri He was staring beyond the words, beyond the abstract marks on the old cream pages, into something beyond the words, the reality that lurked behind them, but not in them. He was thinking what a magic operation writing is, what a symbolic, a signic activity it is, how it is so secretly based on the interpretation of signs, the translation of signs into a mental reality, an inner reality, an inner world. He was thinking how much the words create the words within, and the worlds within enrich the world without.
writing Unknown A good memory is not better than a bad pencil. (Chinese proverb)
polarity Sri Aurobindo Ghose A thousand aspects pointing back to the One; A dual nature covered the Unique. In this meeting of the Eternal's mingling masques, This tangle-dance of passionate contraries.
writing Anne Sexton my nerves are turned on. i hear them like / musical instruments. where there was silence / the drums, the strings are incurably playing. you did this. / pure genius at work. darling, the composer has stepped / into fire. / At what harmonic love, my geniuses*? / *from the latin genius "guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth"
reading contentnu consultancy Readers of Latin-alphabet languages do not, in fact, read word-by-word. Rather, your eye pogo-sticks along the line in so-called saccades. Typographers constantly tell us that we recognize words in part by their outline shape rather than their component letters, explaining why we mistake 'form' and 'from' and 'casual' and 'causal' and why WORDS IN MONOTONOUS CAPITAL LETTERS ARE HARDER TO READ IN THE LONG RUN.
poetry Paul Zarzyski "I was learning to write poems and learning to ride bucking horses pretty much together at the same juncture in my life," Zarzyski says. "The passions might seem at the opposite ends of the spectrum. But for me, that exercise of emotion and the wonderful language that existed, the lingo that surrounded the rodeo arena and around the cowboy world was exactly what added up to poetry."
speaking bunny-a-go-go Is everyone clear about my hatred of spoken word? I find it cheap and simple and annoying.
conversation contenu consultancy Previously, we derided an alleged 'professional' Web designer who earnestly believed that political sites with online videoclips were more 'interactive' than those offering 'only' text and graphics. Wow. 'Click the Play button to watch Stockwell Day’s press conference (RealVideo).' It’s as interactive as changing channels with your remote control. (You’ve provided a stimulus and the site gives you a response - a video stream. But that’s it. Where is the ongoing give-and-take of stimulus and response that constitutes real interactivity, like an actual human conversation or even driving a car?)
poetry Le Corbusier Poetry lies not only in the spoken or written word. The poetry of facts is stronger still. Objects which signify something and which are arranged with talent and with tact create a poetic fact.
writing Raymond Carver For me, Hemingway's sentences are poetry. There's a rhythm, a cadence. I can reread his early stories and I find them as extraordinary as ever. They fire me up as much as ever. It's marvelous writing. He said prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.
writing Charles, Prince of Wales We've got to produce people who can write proper English...You cannot educate people properly unless you do it on a basic framework and drilling system.
general H. Rosen Language is indissolubly linked to power...To think seriously about teaching English we need to understand the paradox that language is both potentially liberating and potentially enslaving.
conversation Jaida n'ha Sandra At its heart this book is about conversation -- the most basic, most varied, and occasionally the most elevating of all human activities. Of course, the ability to converse is not unique to humans -- chimpanzees do it, dolphins do it, even parakeets and poodles manage to make themselves understood by one another. But humans have made conversation the defining experience of our social identities. Conversation is the sea we swim in. Conversation is the way we convey information, inspire each other, and achieve understanding. Conversation is the way we display our prowess, knowledge, and refinement. Conversation is the way we challenge, amuse, and amaze each other. Conversation is the music we make when we commune. But not all conversation is created equal. Some talk, though right and proper, is small. Cocktail chitchat, locker- room bravado, office gossip, and talk show repartee come to mind.
conversation William Vitek Walking is the single best way to experience the here and now. It mimics the beating heart, a rhythm in which the body takes obvious delight. Walking is also the best pace by which our senses can take in the world. We hear conversations, see faces, taste the humid air, sense a change in the weather.
writing Suzanne Vega These days I'm trying to use the language as though it were a piece of wood, and I craft it, I hone it down. I sand it, I polish it, and I make sure there are no cracks, no extra pieces or frills that might fall off. I try to keep it as compact as possible.
polarity Christine Fellbaum There is evidence that opposition relations are psychologically salient not only for adjectives, but also for verbs. For example, in the course of teaching foreign languages the author has experienced that students, when given only one member of an antonymous or opposed verb pair, will insist on being told the other member; they believe that it is easier to learn semantically opposed words together. Fellbaum and Chaffin (1990), in an analygo taks involving different semantic relations between verbs, asked subjects to generate verbs whose relation tothe stimulus matched that of a given pair; they found that subjects were most successful in completing analogies that involved an opposition relation. Moreover, analogies based on opposition relations took the least time to complete. In building the database for verbs, it was found that after synonymy and troponymy, opposition is the most frequently coded semantic relation.
general Ludwig Wittgenstein The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
literature Unknown Measuring the size of the literature of a discipline may present problems, however.
reading Unknown reader at the BNC After the first half hour I was hooked by its beautifully lucid narrative, but thrown by the guffaw factor in some scenes.
general Unknown writer In fact these lectures offered an elegant and lucid exposition of educational theories and assumptions (he had been exercised by this topic since the early forties) and although he failed to arrive at any conclusions he suggested that none could in any case be reached.
writing Unknown writer at The Art Newspaper, London Within its own parameters, however, the book is magnificent.
polarity Aaron Louie Although it has been shown in numerous studies that the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for speech function, we see a case where the dominance of the "speaking" hemisphere is laterally reversed.
writing Benjamin Disraeli "Books are fatal; they are the curse of the human race ... the greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing."
writing Charity Blackstop "We are librarians, and therefore the elect of God. To read is human, to catalogue divine."
writing Roger Mifflin "The world has been printing books for 450 years and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation."
polarity Meg Ryan 'I understand that contradictory things exist in one person,' she says, a little enigmatically.
general Ralph Waldo Emerson The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.
reading Ralph Waldo Emerson There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubtfully significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
reading Ralph Waldo Emerson We are too civil for books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
writing Paulo Coelho Every creative undertaking is an adventure which is at once painful and fascinating: on the one hand, there is the fear of discovering our own ghosts; on the other, the excitement of knowing we are more interesting than we thought we were.
general Madeleine L'Engle Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.
language David Lodge Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
language Frederico Fellini A different language is a different vision of life.
polarity Richard Feynmann You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
polarity Oscar Wilde The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
speaking William Penn (1644 - 1718) Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
general William Shakespeare They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
polarity William Shakespeare I understand a fury in your words, but not the words.
general John Maynard Keynes Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
punctuation W. Somerset Maugham We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.
writing English Proverb Use soft words and hard arguments.
conversation Judith Martin (Miss Manners) Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.
general Charles, Prince of Wales In literature as in language, I would suggest that there are terrible dangers in following fashionable trends in education – toward the relevant, the exclusively contemporary, the immediately palatable.
general Charles, Prince of Wales An inability to express oneself can cause not only practical difficulty, but often leads to an "aridness of spirit". Banality is for nobody. It might be accessible to all, but so is a desert.
general Charles, Prince of Wales If the language is not expressive, fulfilling and creative, as well as accurate and communicative, we are impoverished as human beings and our language will not clothe our thoughts adequately.
writing Arthur Plotnik The truth is this: Writing is a bumper-to-bumper crawl through hell with an occasional jolt to the next level of anguish.
writing Annie Dillard One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.
writing William Strunk Jr Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
writing Ernest Gellner The most significant thing about writing is that it makes possible the detachment of affirmation from the speaker. Without writing, all speech is context-bound: in such conditions, the only way in which an affirmation can be endowed with special solemnity is by ritual emphasis, by an unusual and deliberately solemnized context, by a prescribed rigidity of manner. But once writing is available, an affirmation can be detached from context. The fact that it is so detached in turn constitutes a very special context of a radically new kind. In a sense, the transcendent is born at that point, for meaning now lives without speaker or listener. It also makes possible solemnity without emphasis, and respect for content rather than for context.
writing Ralph Ellison The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
writing Boris Pasternak I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.
writing Alexander Theroux He crafted his writing and loved listening to those tiny explosions when the active brutality of verbs in revolution raced into sweet established nouns to send marching across the page a newly commissioned army of words-on-maneuvers, all decorated in loops, frets, and arrowlike flourishes.
writing Theodore M Bernstein If writing must be a precise form of communication, it should be treated like a precision instrument. It should be sharpened, and it should not be used carelessly.
writing Gloria Steinem Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
writing Andre Maurois Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one’s first productions.
writing Norman Mailer Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
writing Laurence Sterne Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
writing Brenda Ueland ... no writing is a waste of time,—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.
writing Mason Cooley Writing about an idea frees me of it. Thinking about it is a circle of repetitions.
polarity Marshall McLuhan "The key to our future development as a species will depend on how well we understand the relationship between the left side and right side of our associative cortex."
thinking bell hooks The most important learning experience that could happen in our classroom was that students would learn to think critically and analytically, not just about the required books, but about the world they live in.
creativity Pablo Picasso I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
general Alexander Pope Order is Heaven's first law.
writing Alexander Pope? The pen is mightier than the sword.
writing Albert Pike The spoken discourse may roll on strongly as the great tidal wave; but, like the wave, it dies at last feebly on the sands. It is heard by few, remembered by still fewer, and fades away, like an echo in the mountains, leaving no token of power. It is the written human speech, that gave power and permanence to human thought.
achievements Stephen Hawking I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
language Philip K. Dick The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
thinking Mao Tse Tung Take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own.
silence Marcel Marceau Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
silence Marcel Marceau It's good to shut up sometimes.
silence Marcel Marceau In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.
achievements Stephen Hawking I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
writing Dave Barry We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.
polarity Dave Barry A gene can be either dominant or recessive, depending on which type of gene it is.
writing Dave Barry Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism.
reading Anthony Burgess The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
writing Samuel Johnson The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
writing Samuel Johnson Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
writing Anthony Burgess Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
writing John Steffler But I go on looking for a home. For me, the very act of writing is a making of home, a familiarization, a location of self. Home is a blending of self and place I constantly need to recreate. It's an ongoing effort to solve a mystery, to understand the strangeness I live in.
polarity Aldous Huxley And sometimes, when he and the other children were tired with too much playing, one of the old men ofthe pueblo could talk to them, in those other words, of the great Transformer of the World, and of the long fight between the Right Hand and the Left Hand
thinking Albert Pike What is thought? It is not Matter, nor Spirit. It is not a Thing; but a Power and Force. I make upon a paper certain conventional marks, that represent that Thought. There is no Power or Virtue in the marks I write, but only in the Thought which they tell to others. I die, but the Thought still lives. It is a Power. The fact that Thought continues to exist an instant, after it makes its appearance in the soul, proves it immortal: for there is nothing conceivable that can destroy it. The spoken words, being mere sounds, may vanish into thin air, and the written ones,mere marks, be burned, erased, destroyed: but the THOUGHT itself lives still, and must live on forever.
writing W. Somerset Maugham We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
general Pindar in Nemean Odes Words have a longer life than deeds.
conversation Theodore Zeldin Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards; it creates new cards
general Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Scratch, 1988 Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.
conversation Guy de Maupassant Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! Its the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?
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