#language

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ↗

— George Orwell

#design

I think the main thing was that the character couldn't speak in regular language, so he had to be mimed. ↗

— Peter Mayhew

#had #i #i think #language #main

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

#conditions #contexts #easy #employed #expression

If you listen to a language for 15 minutes, you know the rhythm and song. ↗

— Sid Caesar

#know #language #listen #minutes #rhythm

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

#english #english literature #even #exaggeration #greatest

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#age

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#language #poetry #age

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#cities #language #possiblity #walking #architecture

For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. (on commenting the text of Genesis 1:6) ↗

— Jean Calvin

#astronomy #calvin #genesis #art

Actualmente, hablamos de lenguajes en plural, por tanto, de lenguajes cuyo significante no es la palabra: por ejemplo, el lenguaje del cine, de las artes figurativas, de las emociones, etcétera. Pero éstas son acepciones metafóricas. Pues el lenguaje esencial que de verdad caracteriza e instituye al hombre como animal simbólico es «lenguaje-palabra», el lenguaje de nuestra habla. ↗

— Giovanni Sartori

#art