Quotes4study

However much we may cease to speak the language of the faith of our childhood, the faith in a superintending and ever-present Providence grows only stronger the more we see of life, the more we know of ourselves. When that Bass-note is right, we may indulge in many variations, we shall never go entirely wrong.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

With the smile that was childlike and bland.

FRANCIS BRET HARTE. 1839- ----.     _Plain Language from Truthful James._

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

George Orwell

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Mark Twain

>Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently it becomes its master.

_W. B. Clulow._

It is as those among whom there is a certain secret language.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.

_Ruskin._

Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.

Jimmy Wales

Food is a language of care, the thing we do when traditional language fails us, when we don't know what to say, when there are no words to say.

Shauna Niequist

Langage des halles=--Language of the fishmarket.

French.

Poetry is the music of thought, conveyed to us in the music of language.--_Chatfield._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

_Emerson._

There were no ill language if it were not ill taken.

Proverb.

It appears that PL/I (and its dialects) is, or will be, the most widely

used higher level language for systems programming.

Take all that is given, whether wealth, / Or love, or language; nothing comes amiss; / A good digestion turneth all to health.

_George Herbert._

And now, if we gaze from our native shores over the vast ocean of human speech, with its waves rolling on from continent to continent, rising under the fresh breezes of the morning of history, and slowly heaving in our own more sultry atmosphere, with sails gliding over its surface, and many an oar ploughing through its surf, and the flags of all nations waving joyously together, with its rocks and wrecks, its storms and battles, yet reflecting serenely all that is beneath and above and around it; if we gaze and hearken to the strange sounds rushing past our ears in unbroken strains, it seems no longer a wild tumult, but we feel as if placed within some ancient cathedral, listening to a chorus of innumerable voices: and the more intensely we listen, the more all discords melt away into higher harmonies, till at last we hear but one majestic trichord, or a mighty unison, as at the end of a sacred symphony. Such visions will float through the study of the grammarian, and in the midst of toilsome researches his heart will suddenly beat, as he feels the conviction growing upon him that men are brethren in the simplest sense of the word--the children of the same father--whatever their country, their language, and their faith.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

We can now repeat the words which have been settled for us centuries ago, and which we have learnt by heart in our childhood--I believe in God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth--with the conviction that they express, not only the faith of the apostles, or of oecumenical councils, but that they contain the Confession of Faith of the whole world, expressed in different ways, conveyed in thousands of languages, but always embodying the same fundamental truth. I call it fundamental, because it is founded, in the very nature of our mind, our reason, and our language, on a simple and ineradicable conviction that where there are acts there must be agents, and in the end one Prime Agent, whom man may know, not indeed in His own inscrutable essence, yet in His acts, as revealed in Nature.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

God made machine language; all the rest is the work of man.

Unknown

>Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee.

_Ben Jonson._

~Writing.~--Writing, after all, is a cold and coarse interpreter of thought. How much of the imagination, how much of the intellect, evaporates and is lost while we seek to embody it in words! Man made language and God the genius.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Ainsi que son esprit, tout peuple a son langage=--Every nation has its own language as well as its own temperament.

_Voltaire._

Man is one name belonging to every nation upon earth. In them all is one soul though many tongues. Every country has its own language, yet the subjects of which the untutored soul speaks are the same everywhere.

Tertullian

Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath receiv'd our yoke.

EDMUND WALLER. 1605-1687.     _Upon the Death of the Lord Protector._

Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd With me but roughly since I heard thee last.

WILLIAM COWPER. 1731-1800.     _On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture._

What we call Christianity embraces several fundamental doctrines, but the most important of them all is the recognition of the Divine in man, or, as we call it, the belief in the Divinity of the Son. The belief in God, let us say in God the Father, or the Creator and Ruler of the world, had been elaborated by the Jews, and most of the civilised and uncivilised nations of the world had arrived at it. But when the Founder of Christianity called God His Father, and not only His Father, but the Father of all mankind, He did no longer speak the language of either Jews or Greeks. To the Jews, to claim Divine sonship for man would have been blasphemy. To the Greeks, Divine sonship would have meant no more than a miraculous, a mythological event. Christ spoke a new language, a language liable, no doubt, to be misunderstood, as all language is; but a language which to those who understood it has imparted a new glory to the face of the whole world. It is well known how this event, the discovery of the Divine in man, which involves a complete change in the spiritual condition of mankind, and marks the great turning-point in the history of the world, has been surrounded by a legendary halo, has been obscured, has been changed into mere mythology, so that its real meaning has often been quite forgotten, and has to be discovered again by honest and fearless seeking. Christ had to speak the language of His time, but He gave a new meaning to it, and yet that language has often retained its old discarded meaning in the minds of His earliest, nay sometimes of His latest disciples also. The Divine sonship of which He speaks was not blasphemy as the Jews thought, nor mythology as so many of His own followers imagined, and still imagine. Father and Son, divine and human, were like the old bottles that could hardly hold the new wine; and yet how often have the old broken bottles been preferred to the new wine that was to give new life to the world.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

There's language in her eye, her cheeks, her lip, / Nay, her foot speaks.

_Troil. and Cress._, iv. 5.

_Universal._--Morals and language are special but universal sciences.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

>Language is always wise.

_Emerson._

The relation between the spiritual man and his Environment is, in theological language, a filial relation. With the new Spirit, the filial correspondence, he knows the Father--and this is Life Eternal. This is not only the real relation, but the only possible relation: "Neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him." And this on purely natural grounds. Natural Law, p. 229.

Henry Drummond     Beautiful Thoughts

As there is a faculty of speech, independent of all the historical forms of language, there is a faculty of faith in man, independent of all historical religions. If we say it is religion which distinguishes man from the animal, we do not mean the Christian and Jewish religion: we do not mean any special religion: but we mean a mental faculty or disposition, which, independent of, nay in spite of, sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names, and under varying disguises. Without that faculty, no religion, not even the lowest worship of idols and fetishes, would be possible; and if we will but listen attentively, we can hear in all religions a groaning of the spirit, a struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing after the Infinite, a love of God.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last — far off — at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream; but what am I? An infant crying in the night; An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual. Observation found the breath of air again in the human breath, which ceases with death; even today we talk of a dying man breathing his last. Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.

Sigmund Freud

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools.

_Colton._

There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.

_Winter's Tale_, v. 2.

Faith is more basic than language or theology. Faith is the response to something which is calling us from the timeless part of our reality. Faith may be encouraged by what has happened in the past, or what is thought to have happened in the past, but the only proof of it is in the future. Scriptures and creeds may come to seem incredible, but faith will still go dancing on. Even though (because it rejects a doctrine) it is now described as "doubt". This, I believe, is the kind of faith that Christ commended.

Sydney Carter

Algol-60 surely must be regarded as the most important programming language

yet developed. -- T. Cheatham

I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth — it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it. And so how can I go wrong? I shall make some slips no doubt, and shall perhaps talk in second-hand language, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and guide me. Oh, I am full of courage and freshness, and I will go on and on if it were for a thousand years! Do you know, at first I meant to conceal the fact that I corrupted them, but that was a mistake — that was my first mistake! But truth whispered to me that I was lying, and preserved me and corrected me. But how establish paradise — I don't know, because I do not know how to put it into words. After my dream I lost command of words. All the chief words, anyway, the most necessary ones. But never mind, I shall go and I shall keep talking, I won't leave off, for anyway I have seen it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. But the scoffers do not understand that. It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination. Oh! As though that meant so much! And they are so proud! A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

As the evolution of nature can be studied with any hope of success in those products only which nature has left us, the evolution of mind also can be effectually studied in those products only which mind itself has left us. These mental products in their earliest form are always embodied in language, and it is in language, therefore, that we must study the problem of the origin, and of the successive stages in the growth of mind.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.

J. L. Austin

All that literature has to bestow may be obtained by reading and by practical exercise in writing and in speaking; but I do not exaggerate when I say that none of the best gifts of science are to be won by these means. On the contrary, the great benefit which a scientific education bestows, whether as training or as knowledge, is dependent upon the extent to which the mind of the student is brought into immediate contact with facts--upon the degree to which he learns the habit of appealing directly to Nature, and of acquiring through his senses concrete images of those properties of things, which are, and always will be, but approximatively expressed in human language. Our way of looking at Nature, and of speaking about her, varies from year to year; but a fact once seen, a relation of cause and effect, once demonstratively apprehended, are possessions which neither change nor pass away, but, on the contrary, form fixed centres, about which other truths aggregate by natural affinity.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.--_Colton._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Music is the universal language of mankind. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

About Music

That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

Anthony Burgess (born 25 February 1917

No man ever did or ever will become truly eloquent without being a constant reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

_Fisher Ames._

War is what happens when language fails.

Margaret Atwood

Ah Sin was his name.

FRANCIS BRET HARTE. 1839- ----.     _Plain Language from Truthful James._

Every forward step of social progress brings men into closer relations with their fellows, and increases the importance of the pleasures and pains derived from sympathy. We judge the acts of others by our own sympathies, and we judge our own acts by the sympathies of others, every day and all day long, from childhood upwards, until associations, as indissoluble as those of language, are formed between certain acts and the feelings of approbation or disapprobation. It becomes impossible to imagine some acts without disapprobation, or others without approbation of the actor, whether he be one's self or anyone else. We come to think in the acquired dialect of morals. An artificial personality, the "man within," as Adam Smith calls conscience, is built up beside the natural personality. He is the watchman of society, charged to restrain the antisocial tendencies of the natural man within the limits required by social welfare.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they have been written.

_Sir William Jones._

How transitory all human structures are, nay how oppressive the best institutions become in the course of a few generations. The plant blossoms, and fades: your fathers have died, and mouldered into dust: your temple is fallen: your tabernacle, the tables of your law, are no more: language itself, that bond of mankind, becomes antiquated: and shall a political constitution, shall a system of government or religion, that can be erected solely on these, endure for ever?

Johann Gottfried Herder

But for the unquiet heart and brain A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

ALFRED TENNYSON. 1809- ----.     _In Memoriam. v. Stanza 2._

Unkind language is sure to produce the fruits of unkindness, that is, suffering in the bosom of others.

_Bentham._

When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only

say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.

>Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

_Sir H. Davy._

I am inventing a language which must necessarily burst forth from a very new poetics, that could be defined in a couple of words: Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.

Stephane Mallarme

Veritatis simplex oratio est=--The language of truth is simple, _i.e._, it needs not the ornament of many words.

Seneca.

I do not find that the age or country makes the least difference; no, nor the language the actors spoke, nor the religion which they professed, whether Arab in the desert or Frenchman in the Academy. I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 1803-1882.     _Lectures and Biographical Sketches. The Preacher._

Ojiisan says if you want to understand a people, look at their language. The words write the history, not the other way around.

Leza Lowitz

The English Bible,--a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

THOMAS B. MACAULAY. 1800-1859.     _On John Dryden. 1828._

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. … I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.

William Lloyd Garrison

Community of language is no proof of unity of race, is not even presumptive evidence of racial identity. All that it does prove is that, at some time or other, free and prolonged intercourse has taken place between the speakers of the same language.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention

to the irrelevant.

It was the duty of the Apostles and of the early Christians in general to stand forth in the name of the only true God, and to prove to the world that their God had nothing in common with the idols worshipped at Athens and Ephesus. It was the duty of the early converts to forswear all allegiance to their former deities, and if they could not at once bring themselves to believe that the gods whom they had worshipped had no existence at all, they were naturally led on to ascribe to them a kind of demoniacal nature, and to curse them as the offspring of that new principle of Evil with which they had become acquainted in the doctrines of the early Church.... Through the whole of St. Augustine's works, and through all the works of earlier Christian divines, there runs the same spirit of hostility blinding them to all that may be good, and true, and sacred, and magnifying all that is bad, false, and corrupt, in the ancient religions of mankind. Only the Apostles and their immediate disciples venture to speak in a different and, no doubt, in a more truly Christian spirit of the old forms of worships.... What can be more convincing, more powerful, than the language of St. Paul at Athens?

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell (born 25 June 1903

Profanity is the one language all programmers know best.

Unknown

Poesy is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

_Denham._

Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used.

Unknown

No literature is complete until the language in which it is written is dead.

_Longfellow._

You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of

supercomputers.

As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it; 'tis the short-hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room.--_Jeremy Collier._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Christianity is Christianity by this one fundamental truth, that as God is the father of man, so truly, and not poetically, or metaphorically only, man is the son of God, participating in God's very essence and nature, though separated from God by self and sin. This oneness of nature between the Divine and the human does not lower the concept of God by bringing it nearer to the level of humanity; on the contrary, it raises the old concept of man and brings it nearer to its true ideal. The true relation between God and man had been dimly foreseen by many prophets and poets, but Christ was the first to proclaim that relation in clear and simple language. He called Himself the Son of God, and He was the firstborn son of God in the fullest sense of that word. But He never made Himself equal with the Father in whom He lived and moved and had His being. He was man in the new and true sense of the word, and in the new and true sense of the word He was God. To my mind man is nothing if He does not participate in the Divine.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

Music is the language of the soul, but it defies interpretation. It means something, but that something belongs not to this world of sense and logic, but to another world, quite real, though beyond all definition.... Is there not in Music, and in Music alone of all the arts, something that is not entirely of this earth?... Whence comes melody? Surely not from anything that we hear with our outward ears and are able to imitate, to improve, or to sublimise.... Here if anywhere we see the golden stairs on which angels descend from heaven and whisper sweet sounds into the ears of those who have ears to hear. Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we know, are of the earth, earthy. Melodies are not of the earth, and it is truly said,

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

It was Christianity which first broke down the barrier between Jew and Gentile, between Greek and Barbarian, between the white and the black. _Humanity_ is a word which you look for in vain in Plato and Aristotle; the idea of mankind as one family, as the children of one God, is an idea of Christian growth; and the science of mankind, and of the languages of mankind, is a science which, without Christianity, would never have sprung into life. When people had been taught to look upon all men as brethren, then, and then only, did the variety of human speech present itself as a problem that called for a solution in the eyes of thoughtful observers; and from an historical point of view it is not too much to say that the first day of Pentecost marks the real beginning of the science of language.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

The language of truth is simple.

_Euripides._

Then it is said, Is not Christ God? Yes, He is, but in His own sense, not in the Jewish nor in the Greek sense, nor in the sense which so many Christians attach to that article of their faith. Christ's teaching is that we are of God, that there is in us something divine, that we are nothing if we are not that. He also teaches that through our own fault we are now widely separated from God, as a son may be entirely separated and alienated from his father. But God is a perfect and loving Father--He knows that we can be weak, and yet be good, and when His lost sons return to Him He receives them and forgives them as only a father can forgive. Let us bestow all praise and glory on Christ as the best son of God. Let us feel how unworthy we are to be called His brothers, and the children of God, but let us not lose Christ, and lose our Father whom He came to show us, by exalting Jesus beyond the place which He claimed Himself. Christ never calls Himself the Father, He speaks of His Father with love, but always with humility and reverence. All attempts to find in human language a better expression than that of son have failed. Theologians and philosophers have tried in vain to define more accurately the relation of Christ to the Father, of man to God. They have called Christ another person of the Godhead. Is that better than Christ's own simple human language, I go to my Father?

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

>Language is the dress of thought.

_Johnson._

The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language.

Scot McKnight

Mysterious language is not a sign of wisdom. The wiser a person is, the simpler the language he uses to express his thoughts.

Lev Nikolaevich (Leo) Tolstoy

Our language has yet to develop a proper send-off for leaving a close friend’s deathbed.

Daniel Polansky

Index: