Spoken language quotes:

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What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language. -- Jane Goodall
I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate. -- Jane Goodall
Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one? -- Swami Vivekananda
Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection. -- Richard Leakey
The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears. -- John Muir
In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation. -- Stephen Leacock
I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten. -- Antonin Artaud
However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. -- Henry David Thoreau
The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist. -- Jane Goodall
The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules. -- Judith Martin
It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race. -- Lafcadio Hearn
In conducting interviews, my fascination is not only with the content of the conversation, but also the overall delivery of spoken language - so much of one's personality and story is embedded within their speech, their rhythms, the structure of their thoughts, their use of particular diction or dialect. -- Steve Cosson
The fact that slang is apt and forceful makes its use irresistibly tempting. Coarse or profane slang is beside the mark, but "flivver," "taxi," the "movies," "deadly" (meaning dull), "feeling fit," "feeling blue," "grafter," a "fake," "grouch," "hunch" and "right o!" are typical of words that it would make our spoken language stilted to exclude. -- Emily Post
Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks. -- Alfred North Whitehead
The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions. -- J. M. G. Le Clezio
Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them. -- Leonard Mlodinow
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
Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word. -- Timothy Noah
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
The spoken form is in fact a very restrained representation of what is possible in the musical language. -- Robert Fripp
Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today. -- Diane Wakoski
Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage. -- Marilyn vos Savant
There's something about studying body language and non-spoken emotion - I know the innate response. But to really study it like a science would be fun. -- Shia LaBeouf
Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's. -- John McWhorter
Our pop scene is among the best in the world because there are 300 languages spoken on the streets of London, compared with 200 in New York. Our diversity is our strength. -- Charles Hazlewood
No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. -- Joshua Foer
I've spoken with a few employers who have moved away from what has to be some of the least attractive language you could use about health risk to start talking about wellbeing. -- Tom Rath
I like to write in coffee shops in countries in which languages I do not speak are spoken. That way, you're surrounded by the buzz of humanity, but you aren't distracted by people's conversations. -- Adam Mansbach
I loved England's gentility and its civility. I'm from the Bronx, with a Bronx accent. I love the beauty of its language, the ways it's spoken. I love the green grass of England and the flowers. -- Sid Bernstein
Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds. -- Jeffrey Kluger
Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language. -- John McWhorter
Study a foreign language if you have opportunity to do so. You may never be called to a land where that language is spoken, but the study will have given you a better understanding of your own tongue or of another tongue you may be asked to acquire. -- Gordon B. Hinckley
To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home. -- Delmore Schwartz
Music is the language spoken by angels. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I certainly like that the Spanish language is spoken around me. -- Andrew Breitbart
Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German. -- Anne Frank
Symbols are the language of something invisible spoken in the visible world. -- Gertrud von Le Fort
When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell! -- William Halsey
Richard Burton had a tremendous passion for the English language, especially the spoken and written word -- Frank Bough
Art is communication spoken by man for humanity in a language raised above the everyday happening. -- Mary Wigman
Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner. -- John Dewey
Better than chanting a thousand words in a dead language is one soothing word spoken in the vernacular. -- Gautama Buddha
The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere. -- Paul Celan
To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth. -- Spyridon Marinatos
Working with the Latin language is pretty powerful. Working with a language that is not spoken vernacularly is intense. -- Eyvind Kang
In the silence of the Cross, the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue and peace is spoken. -- Pope Francis
You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The audience I'm targeting doesn't care about the language spoken in the films they watch. They're interested in more important things like story, performance, cinematography etc. -- Chika Anadu
What I liked about Greece was [...] the impressive force of the language itself, unconfined by dictionaries, spoken in the streets, in cafÃ©s and in the country. -- Peter Levi
Just remember, the language of gesture is more effective than the spoken word. Body language is very powerful. Bring the balance within you and project that balance. -- Harbhajan Singh Yogi
The language of [Catholic] mysticism - its repeated attempts to lay consciousness itself bare and speak all the intensely opposing yet interconnected parts of it that cannot be spoken. -- Helen Oyeyemi

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