Saul Williams Quotes

I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested in.

I grew up in a house where language was appreciated and cared about. I'm sure that, although I wasn't aware of it at the time, it must have made an impression on me.

I never really thought I had an extensive vocabulary like that, and I'm not an avid reader. I didn't read a lot growing up - at all.

I like to relish words and sentences, and phraseology, and there's not much facility for that [playing Maigret].

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.

Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multihued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.

By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.

The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.

I've got a little baby, I made him...He doesn't speak, he's 2...He's a slow learner, he's only got 2 words...car and map...I'm slightly worried he's trying to escape. If his next word is passport we are in serious trouble!

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.

My grandfather, mother and father were gifted verbally, and my mother passed that along to me. She always made sure I was conscious of language and words.

I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.

They say he's an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages! I've got a 15-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages!

All of us, just because we are able to talk, also believe we are able to talk about language.

When I start asking my friends, "What do you think this means?" And it leads to way more interesting conversations than what it actually ends up meaning in the dictionary. Like "apocryphal," for instance.

I used to teach. I quote American history and I love words. I've read the dictionary I don't know how many times throughout my life. People say, "You read the dictionary?" I say, "Yes, and you can really believe it."

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.

If you love language, it will love you back.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.