Benjamin Whorf Quotes

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

Writing in another language gives me an additional freedom, an additional way of thinking. It's a challenge, but I like the challenge.

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

I'm a passionate Welshman. I have a culinary relationship with language: I taste what I say because I have two languages, and each informs the other.

When you're speaking Spanish, you're thinking in a different way.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didn't even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.

A different language is a different vision of life.

Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions.

People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

The way I think or sing about something is very different if it is in Spanish or English.

Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.

English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach.

I would love to be bilingual. I think having a second or third language at my bidding would open up the world in amazing ways.

I think the open mind is the one that's reachable.

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn't exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.

Each language is a different lens from through which you view the world. So, learn as much as you can!

I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast, give you the program in your own tongue.

To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.

Even if people are suspicious of the motives I think that learning and speaking two languages can only be a good thing for people.

I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.