Language and meaning quotes:

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Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word. -- Timothy Noah
In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language. -- Peter Zumthor
Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels. -- Willard Van Orman Quine
My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning. -- Mark Z. Danielewski
Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. -- Michael Cunningham
Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language. -- Roman Jakobson
Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning. -- John W. Dawson
Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged. -- Kevin J. Anderson
Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves. -- Kenneth Branagh
Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone. -- Octavio Paz
Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally. -- Rabih Alameddine
When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth. -- William H. Hunt
Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective. -- Kenneth Lee Pike
Cultures, along with the religions that shape and nurture them, are value systems, sets of traditions and habits clustered around one or several languages, producing meaning: for the self, for the here and now, for the community, for life. -- Tariq Ramadan
My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak. -- Elfriede Jelinek
As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use. -- Noam Chomsky
Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing. -- Jerry Saltz
I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn't taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable. -- Hussein Chalayan
If the rules of a language are followed, words usually make sense. But these very rules can stir the impulse to rebel. We're obliged to keep trying to convey meaning through correct sentences. After a while, the good-soldier rigidity of polished prose can begin to seem dull, and it gets harder to resist the temptation of nonsense. -- Joanna Scott
The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written. -- Emir Kusturica
Literature is language charged with meaning -- Ezra Pound
Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning. -- David Mitchell
If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning. -- Kenneth Lee Pike
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning. -- Stanley Kunitz
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. -- Ezra Pound
This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us... -- Dan Simmons
In the Trump language, words change their meaning day by day depending on his own political needs. -- E. J. Dionne
The nature of language may determine what most people say, but I always speak my own meaning. -- Mason Cooley
Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup. -- Mary Pipher
When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual. -- Ellen Goodman
It is not often that we use language correctly; usually we use it incorrectly, though we understand each others meaning. -- Saint Augustine
In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics. -- Samuel P. Huntington
I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents. -- Ray Kurzweil
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. -- Toni Morrison
You can't show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is meaningless; by its nature, language is packed with meaning and emotion. -- Kenneth Goldsmith
I find labels "liberal" and "conservative" of little meaning. Our language has become perverted along with the thoughts of many of us. -- Studs Terkel
The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system. -- Walker Evans
Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else. -- Eric Maisel
Geometry in every proposition speaks a language which experience never dares to utter; and indeed of which she but halfway comprehends the meaning. -- William Whewell
What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing. -- Terence McKenna
And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language -- Mary Balogh
Music gives us a language that cuts across the disciplines, helps us to see connections and brings a more coherent meaning to our world. -- Ernest L. Boyer
If language is not rectified, words do not correspond to meaning, and if words do not correspond to meaning, our deeds cannot be accomplished. -- Confucius
There's almost no content in terms of language at all. I don't like using language to convey meaning. I'd rather use images and music. -- Philip Glass
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
The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial. -- Robin Marantz Henig
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
Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations. -- Peter L. Berger
Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning. -- Naomi Wolf
Bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of. -- O. Henry
All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience. -- John Dewey
Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner. -- Paul Ricoeur
Photography has clarity in the same way that language has. A word is precise, but its meaning can change based on the words around it: think tank, tank top. -- Jason Fulford

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