George Eliot Quotes

Most of the words you know and love and use every day are not words you learned by looking them up in a dictionary and reading a definition.

I myself have already spent a third of my life in Germany, first in Cologne and then, since 1994, in Berlin.

I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

I sing in Hungarian. I read Hungarian. I do not pretend to speak Hungarian, but I sing in languages that I have studied as languages. And I find that to be central and very, very helpful. I think if you're not really cognizant of what every single word means, I think that might be a little tricky.

Children are like men, the experience of others does not help them.

The manner in which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet

I took about four or five years of French in high school, but I definitely don't speak French as well as I thought I did then.

The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.

In fact, I learnt Hindi over a period of time after I started doing TV shows.

Reading or written language is a cultural invention that necessitated totally new connections among structures in the human brain underlying language, perception, cognition, and, over time, our emotions.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?

One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.

Just the attempt to learn a [new] language is like running different software through the brain.

Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.

The learning is the heavy lifting. You need to get the words into your brain.

Some experience is helpful. "The Pianist" was a film that I could make with my eyes closed because I had lived it and everything was still alive in me.

So many times I thought to myself, man, I never want to do drugs again. But I would never sacrifice any experience I've ever had on them, and I am not remorseful that I've done them. I would like to get more and more away from drugs.

You know, old folks can have dreams, too, as well as young folks, and then work toward them. And to have a dream like this come true for me is just a terrific experience.

The everyday brain could be dubbed "the baseline brain," because it operates at the minimum functioning to keep you alive and healthy. It controls your heart rate, your blood pressure, your immune function, all of your subconscious impulses. That's not a minor role; the baseline brain is a marvel of complexity and efficiency. But too much of it is devoted to habits, old conditioning, unconscious reflexes, and lack of self-awareness.