#lang

English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what. ↗

— Tomson Highway

#indigenous-peoples #language #nature #equality

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered. ↗

— Michael Richardson

#language #poetry #surrealism #words #world

As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses! ↗

— Sheri S. Tepper

#vocabulary #experience

A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#peer-review #physics #science #scientific-language #experience

My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in this, I believe – to experience language as a collection of sounds, to be forced to the surface of words where meanings vanish – but it was also quite wearing, and it had the effect of shutting me up in my thoughts. ↗

— Paul Auster

#experience

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#christianity #jesus #language #magic #mysticism

He said "cool" like I say a Spanish word when I'm not sure of the pronunciation. ↗

— Kelley Armstrong

#funny #language #spanish #funny

Molitveni jezik jedini je jezik u kojem nema jezičnih zabrana. Kako je već rečeno, on je obuhvatniji od jezika vjere koja je sigurna u samu sebe. U jeziku molitve može se naime reći i to da se ne može vjerovati. ↗

— Johann Baptist Metz

#language-of-faith #language-of-prayer #prayer #faith

I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me. ↗

— Matt Groening

#humor #language #satire #simpsons #social-commentary

I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung. ↗

— Anna Funder

#germany #beauty