Human Language quotes:

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Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. -- Lewis Thomas
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world. -- Noam Chomsky
Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. -- James C. Maxwell
I am calling attention just to the main points of these tremendously important matters, which can be understood better by pious meditation than explained by human language. -- Martin Chemnitz
Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out. -- Jay Griffiths
If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic. -- David Novak
As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying. -- Umberto Eco
All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis. -- Jacques Ellul
Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution. -- Donald Johanson
The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures. -- John Shelby Spong
You couldn't have human society without language. -- John Maynard Smith
Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature. -- W. H. Auden
Music is the most spiritual language for the human being. -- Celedonio Romero
Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty. -- Yasunari Kawabata
Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals. -- Noam Chomsky
Language was invented because of the deep human need to complain. -- Lily Tomlin
The true language of commerce is the natural conversation between human beings. -- William C. Brown
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language. -- Ezra Pound
Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help. -- Thomas Keating
The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life. -- Eudora Welty
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. -- Robert Bringhurst
Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions. -- Pattiann Rogers
Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution. -- Jean Berko Gleason
Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language. -- Carl Sandburg
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language. -- Alfred North Whitehead
Human suffering is articulated in language; communication is how we seek help, consolation, etc. -- Rigoberto Gonzalez
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Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times. -- Carl Jung
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories. -- Aleksandar Hemon
Without language, it is safe to say that man would not have become fully human. -- Weston La Barre
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs. -- Noam Chomsky
Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes. -- Spencer Wells
The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language. -- Monique Wittig
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human. -- Karl Marx
There is a language beyond human language, an elemental language, one that arises from the land itself. -- Linda Hogan
Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing. -- Claude Levi-Strauss
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. -- Alfred North Whitehead
Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history. -- Russell Hoban
I think when we engage in language we are engaging in something that is specifically and primally human. -- ZZ Packer
The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate. -- Michael Eric Dyson
paraphrasing.."Science is the language of the intellect of society. Art is language of the entire human personality. -- Naguib Mahfouz
NVC is founded on language and communication skills that strengthen our ability to remain human, even under trying conditions. -- Marshall B. Rosenberg
Language should fulfill your individual existence as a wholesome human being... Language should be more than just getting by. -- Chogyam Trungpa
Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. -- James C. Maxwell
Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup. -- Mary Pipher
Most human beings know only the language of exploitation. Due to their selfishness, they are unable to consider others. -- Mata Amritanandamayi
What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language. -- Jane Goodall
I believe that music surpasses even language in its power to mirror the innermost recesses of the human soul -- George Crumb
The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague. -- Garth Stein
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character. -- Henry David Thoreau
Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition. -- Jane Yolen
One of the most frustrating words in the human language, as far as I could tell, was love" - Bethany -- Alexandra Adornetto
Besides language and music, mathematics is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind. -- Hermann Weyl
A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking. -- Seymour Papert
Whether consciously or not, sexist God language undermines the human equality of women made in the divine image and likeness. -- Elizabeth A. Johnson
The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Drawing - it's the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words, human beings was drawing. -- Marjane Satrapi
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind. -- Susanne Katherina Langer
Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information. -- Thomas Paine
We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute. -- David Abram
What's exciting about theatre is observing human behaviour. You're constantly making judgments about body language, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual. -- Hattie Morahan
Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one's own and that of other people. -- Leon Trotsky
If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature. -- Charlton Laird
The Democrats are using the human trafficking bill's language that's been there for 40 years, regarding the use of federal funds for abortion. -- Barack Obama
The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. -- Paul Eluard
The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. -- Lewis Thomas
The language of science?and especially of a science of man?is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity. -- Thomas Szasz
Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language. -- Carol Shields
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man. -- John Berger
Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, oneâ??s own and that of other people. -- Leon Trotsky
What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today when human contacts go so fast. Fashion is instant language. -- Miuccia Prada
That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted. -- George Boole
What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language. -- Miuccia Prada
In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry -- Krista Tippett
Human eyes are the sign language of the brain. If you watch them carefully, you can see the truth played out, raw and unguarded. -- Tarryn Fisher
Drawing is the first language of the human being before writing. It's a transcription of how the human being sees reality, not reality itself. -- Marjane Satrapi
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world. -- Steven Pinker
Man can think of divine things only in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language. -- Swami Vivekananda
A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it. -- Victor Hugo
The strongest human emotion is probably love. I think it's universal. I think that across language and country and time and everything else, probably love. -- Mark Hoppus
I try to connect to human emotion. I'm always looking for something primal, something really base that is beyond language, that people understand beyond language. -- Will Smith
Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul. -- Carl Jung
There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind -- Noam Chomsky
Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that. -- Noam Chomsky
It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable. -- Terence McKenna
The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning. -- Malidoma Patrice Some
What is music? Music is language. A human being wants to express ideas in this language, but not ideas that can be translated into concepts... -- Anton Webern
The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness. -- Immanuel Wallerstein
Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human. -- Carmen Boullosa
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. -- Zadie Smith
The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence. -- Gao Xingjian
Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language. -- Diane Ackerman
There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. -- Washington Irving
No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch. -- Peter Farb
Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Prayer no longer seems like an activity to me; it has become the continuing language of the relationship I believe God designed to fulfill a human life. -- Keith Miller
Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts. -- Eduardo Galeano
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension. -- Ezra Pound
One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. -- James Joyce
Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human. -- Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. -- Niels Bohr
Music is the last true voice of the human spirit. It can go beyond language, beyond age, and beyond color straight to the mind and heart of all people. -- Ben Harper
Every human being born within the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen. -- John Bingham
There is no word in the English language for the feeling someone gets when they suddenly realize they're standing next to an unholy monster impersonating a human. Monstralization, maybe? -- David Wong
I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally. -- Terence McKenna
In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language. -- Mikhail Tal
One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology. -- Steven Pinker

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