Innate Language Quotes & Sayings

She will give me all of herself, and I will take it. I will take it all, and then I'll demand more. — Anna Zaires

Rather to excite your judgment briefly than to inform it tediously. — Francis Bacon

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

[S]elf-assurance, motivation, and a good method play a much more important role in language learning than the vague concept of innate ability, and that dealing with languages is not only an effective and joyful means of developing human relationships, but also of preserving one's mental capacity and spiritual balance. — Kato Lomb

Language has to be partly innate, simply because human babies are born with the ability to learn the language of their parents. While this can justifiably be called a language instinct, there is no one gene compelling us to produce language. Instead, a set of genetic settings gives rise to a set of behaviors and perceptual and cognitive biases, some of which may be more general and others of which are more language specific. — Christine Kenneally

We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends. — Chinua Achebe

UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language. — Noam Chomsky

He tried to get the Caddy to run some of the life-organizing protocols, but they were pretty useless without connectivity. — Charlie Jane Anders

Schuyler pulled Oliver close and hugged him tightly. "Thank you," she whispered. Thank you for loving me enough to let me go. — Melissa De La Cruz

People are optimistic about the future. — Helen Clark

Ethology developed its own specialized language about instincts, fixed action patterns (a species' stereotypical behavior, such as the dog's tail wagging), innate releasers (stimuli that elicit specific behavior, such as the red dot on a gull's bill that triggers pecking by hungry chicks), displacement activities (seemingly irrelevant actions resulting from conflicting tendencies, such as scratching oneself before a decision), and so on. Without going into the details of its classical framework, — Frans De Waal

What I want to know is how the white man, with the blood of black people dripping off his fingers, can have the audacity to be asking black people, 'Do they hate him?' That takes a lot of nerve. — Malcolm X

It's always the same, Combs walks, Koening singles, Ruth hits one out of the park, Gehrig doubles, Lazzeri triples. Then Dugan goes in the dirt on his can. — Joe Dugan

History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a function that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world's insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own. — Alan Moore

We writers aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands (interoffice memos, supermarket receipts, etc.), it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream. — Jonathan Lethem

As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don't. — Charles De Lint

Language is deeply entwined in the intellectual development of humanity itself, it accompanies the latter upon every step of its localized progression or regression; moreover, the pertinent cultural level in each case is recognizable in it ... Language is, as it were, the external manifestation of the minds of peoples. Their language is their soul, and their soul is their language. It is impossible to conceive them ever sufficiently identical ... The creation of language is an innate necessity of humanity. It is not a mere external vehicle, designed to sustain social intercourse, but an indispensable factor for the development of human intellectual powers, culminating in the formulation of philosophical doctrine. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

You think you should have an answer to the question, 'What's wrong?' You wish you knew. No one can understand how much you wish you knew. You know you must be horrible to live with, to be around. Because you cannot stand to be you - to be in your own skin. — Juliann Garey

God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools ... and He has not been disappointed. — Antonin Scalia

There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe. — Joshua Foer

Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language. — Steven Pinker

It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology. — Niels Kaj Jerne

This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous 'I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in Ecclesiastes as 'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account' should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world. — David Foster Wallace

What is it with folks always talking about where they're from? You could grow up in a muddy ditch, but if it's your muddy ditch, then it's gotta be the swellest muddy ditch ever. — Jennifer L. Holm

Coming to appreciate your worth can, in some cases, dramatically improve your circumstances by changing the choices you make and the actions you take. And as you begin to treat yourself with more respect, other people begin to do the same, since we subconsciously "train" others how to treat us through messages we send through body language, tone of voice, and other subtle cues and behaviors. Discovering your innate worth and living from that place allows you to make more constructive choices-to choose the higher roads of life — Dan Millman

What do they mean to you?" he asked, leaning back into the portable thicket of his gray vested suit. Beverly took back her pages and studied them. After a while, she looked up. "They mean to me that the universe . . . growls, and sings. No, shouts." The learned astronomer was shocked. In dealing with the public he was often confronted by lunatics and visionaries, some of whose theories were elegant, some absurd, and some, perhaps, right on the mark. But those were usually old bearded men who lived in lofts crowded with books and tools, eccentrics who walked around the city, pushing carts full of their belongings, madmen from state institutions that could not hold them. There was always something arresting and true about their thoughts, as if their lunacy were as much a gift as an affliction, though the heavy weight of the truth they sensed so strongly had clouded their reason, and all the wonder in what they said was shattered and disguised. He — Mark Helprin

Markets are a social construction, they're made from institutions. We in a democratic society create markets, we constitute markets, we bring them into existence, and we shouldn't turn markets over to a narrow group of people who regulate them and run them in their interests, rather they should be run democratically for the common good. — Douglas Massey

Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being "pursued or declared a failure." All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, "You're a failure! — Jon Ronson

With self-courage, self-confidence and self-will, you will master the act. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one. To even call somebody "a creative person" is almost laughably redundant; creativity is the hallmark of our species. We have the sense for it; we have the curiosity for it; we have the opposable thumbs for it; we have the rhythm for it; we have the language and the excitement and the innate connection to divinity for it.
If you're alive, you're a creative person. You and I and everyone you know are descended from tens of thousands of years of makers. Decorators, tinkerers, storytellers, dancers, explorers, fiddlers, drummers, builders, growers, problem-solvers, and embellishers
these are our common ancestors. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Buttressing this argument (that you can prevent children from learning to read or ride bicycles but you can't stop them from learning to talk), Chomsky had pointed to two other universals in human language: that its emergence in children follows a very precise timetable of development, no matter where they live or which particular language is the first they learn; and that language itself has an innate structure. Chomsky has recently reminded audiences that the origins of the structure of language - how semantics and syntax interact - remain as "arcane" as do its behavioral and neurologic roots. Chomsky himself finds nothing in classical Darwinism to account for human language.* And for that reason, says Plotkin, linguistics is left with a major theoretical dilemma. If human language is a heritable trait but one that represents a complete discontinuity from animal communicative behavior, where did it come from? — Frank R. Wilson

I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble. — Jenny Saville