Language Limitation Quotes

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?

Profanity is the effort of a feeble brain to express itself forcibly.

I do rap and speak in Malayalam but only to save my life as my vocabulary in the language is not as good as it is in Hindi.

The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.

I'm very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, 'That's the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.'

I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.

For 'City of Ghosts,' I really didn't speak any Arabic. It obviously made it more difficult, but I also found it to be an advantage while shooting. It allowed me to focus on the emotion of the scene as opposed to just chasing dialogue.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

There are so many people in the world who cannot read English or French or whatever.

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.

You cannot sing African music in proper English

All language is but a poor translation.

Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe" le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.