Language Changing Quotes & Sayings

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not. — Neil Postman

The River of Baptism I met, my spiritual adoption confirmed. The changing dramas in my life I experienced. The Holy language preceded my salvation found tongue, candidate of heavenly power I'm made. — Darmie Orem

And it is a singular truth that, though a man may shake off national habits, accent, manner of thinking, style of dress,
though he may become perfectly identified with another nation, and speak its language well, perhaps better than his own,
yet never can he succeed in changing his handwriting to a foreign style. — Benjamin Disraeli

Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language PERFECT, in the language pundit's mind? One has the feeling that the decline-mongers would feel rather sheepish has reading any answer. The 1950s? The Edwardian era? The real answer, however rarely expressed, seems to be when Island it as a young person. — Robert Lane Greene

Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality. — Adrienne Rich

Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance. — Carl Maria Von Weber

I think it's important and I think it's true that our life experience is going to be about our attitude, our thoughts, our beliefs, our speech and our actions. We can transform our life experience simply by changing our language. — Jason Mraz

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning. — Stanley Kunitz

If there's one thing consistent about language it is that it is constantly changing. The only languages that do not change are those whose speakers are dead. — Rosalie Maggio

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests. — Thom Yorke

Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies. — June Jordan

It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike
in the second place, folks don't like to have someone around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates them. Your not gonna change any of them by talkin' right, they've got to want to learn themselves, and when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language. — Harper Lee

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple "first" things. — Greg McKeown

My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown. — Aliya Whiteley

VanessaPlace Inc. is a trans-national corporation whose sole mission is to design and manufacture objects to meet the poetic needs of the human heart, face, and form. What is poetry really worth? What is poetry's purpose - personally, culturally, politically, financially? VanessaPlace offers a language-based solution to these and other dilemmas facing the culture business today. The poetry-products of VanessaPlace turn cultural capital into capitalized culture through a game-changing, dynamic shift of focus from manifesto to manifestation. — Vanessa Place

The language is perpetually in flux: it is a living stream, shifting, changing, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time. — William Strunk Jr.

I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality. — Morris Graves

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise, — Jacqueline Woodson

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least. — Pat Conroy

Dr. Johnson's enticing images and language give us a fundamentally sound and memorable way of managing change." - Albert J. Simone, President ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY "Spencer Johnson's unique insights and storytelling make this a rare book that can be read and understood quickly by everyone who wants to do well in these changing times." - Randy Harris, Former Vice-Chairman MERRILL LYNCH INTERNATIONAL "This book is a simple, understandable road map for us to use as we deal with our own individual circumstances around change." - Michael Morley, Senior Vice President EASTMAN KODAK "This wonderful book is an asset to any person or group that applies its lessons." - John A. Lopiano, Senior V.P. XEROX CORPORATION — Spencer Johnson

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture. — Ravi Zacharias

To change your language you must change your life. — Derek Walcott

Mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars. — Mark Twain

Poets may boast (as safely-vain) Their work shall with the world remain: Both bound together, live, or die, The verses and the prophecy. But who can hope his lines shou'd long Last, in a daily changing tongue? While they are new, envy prevails, And as that dies, our language fails. — Edmund Waller

That a language may retain its vitality and dignity, two things are necessary. In the first place, it must keep in close touch with life, and must respond to those constant alterations which look like corruptions but which are quite as often signs of growth. In the second place, it must submit to some kind of selective authority which creates a generally recognized but slowly changing norm of speech. Without the former condition a language will become rigid, conventional, and emotionless; without the second it will just as surely tend to become provincial and formless--even unintelligible, except locally and ephemerally. — Paul Elmer More

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter ... [Language] is being eroded
it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us. — Ralph Fiennes

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. — T. S. Eliot

I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills. — Ben Lerner

Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed. — Casey Miller

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive. — Matt Ridley

The extraordinary language of Nonviolent Communication is changing how parents relate to children, teachers to students, and how we all related to each other and even to ourselves. It is precise, disciplined, and enormously compassionate. Most important, once we study NVC we can't ignore the potential for transformation that lies in any difficult relationship - if we only bother to communicate with skill and empathy. — Bernie Glassman

[L]anguage functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others. — John Wiswell

Exploring microhistories, cultural history can "track the changing interplay among schools of thought and language patronage and power of financing and control, teaching traditions and elites," that is, make us aware of the discursive workings of power. — Martin Prochazka

Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. ( ... ) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates. — Robert Macfarlane

And that is the trouble with all lovers: they want more love, because they don't understand that the real desire is not for more love, but for something more than love. Their language ends with love; they don't know any way that is higher than love, and love does not satisfy. On the contrary, the more you love the more thirsty you become. At the fourth center of love, one feels a tremendous satisfaction only when energy starts moving to the fifth center. — Rajneesh

As the number and the size of cities keep growing across the world, changing conditions bring shifts in language and vocabulary. Despite the social and linguistic complexity, however, there are only two types of cities: those where a woman can walk after dark relatively freely and those where she possibly cannot. - Elif Shafak, Taksim Square, Istanbul: Byzantine, Then and Now, — Catie Marron

There is something new in the air. There is, there is a - a hunger for an open, non-dogmatic, form of Christian faith and practice, which adapts itself to a rapidly changing world; and speaks to that world the message of Jesus Christ. And a freedom to rediscover some of the language of the tradition now that's it's not handed down to us, you know, with a strict framework of doctrinal, fixed structures. — Philip Clayton

Nature alone can speak to our intelligence an imperishable language, never changing, because it remains within the bounds of eternal truth and of what is absolutely noble and beautiful. — George Sand

When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose - not simply accept - the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. — George Orwell

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

If you're one of those people who worry that the English language is going to the dogs, linguists are of no help to you. Whatever it is that annoys you - double negatives, the demise of whom, the non-standard usage of literally - linguists will answer that a language is a living thing, and is always changing. You can't stop the process, so you'd better get used to it. — Gaston Dorren

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent. — Pat Conroy

The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance apparent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modified the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiquity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra-epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap forwards. — Peter Sloterdijk

There is no other word in the English language more life-changing than Hello — Patrick Stevens

The fundamental language of life is change. Life will keep on changing. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Their little life is entirely controlled by the organization of the world. They think as the world thinks. They take their opinions ready-made from their favorite newspaper. Their very appearance is controlled by the world and its changing fashions. They all conform; it must be done; they dare not disobey; they are afraid of the consequences. That is tyranny, this is absolute control - clothing, hair style, everything, absolutely controlled. The mind of the world! ... Most lives are being controlled by it and governed by it, all their opinions, their language, the way they spend their money, what they desire, where they go, where they spend their holidays; it is all controlled, governed completely ... by this world, the mind of the world, the age of propaganda, the age of advertising, the mass mind, the mass man, the mass individual, without knowing it. Is it not tragic? But that is man in sin ... he is controlled by the mind of the world. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

It was hard for me to do the show (All American Girl) because a lot of people didn't even understand the concept of Asian-American. I was on a morning show, and the host said, 'Awright, Margaret, we're changing over to an ABC affiliate! So why don't you tell our viewers in your native language that we're making that transition?' So I looked at the camera and said, 'Um, they're changing over to an ABC affiliate'. — Margaret Cho

The war in the East were hidden behind a thicket of language: patriotism, democracy, loyality, fredom - the words bounced around, changing purpose, as if they were made out of some funny plastic. What did they actually refer to? It seemed that they all might refer to money ... — Deborah Eisenberg

I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realized everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn't want it to. — Lee Child

It is also clear, unfortunately,that ideology runs deeper than the hopeful might have previously imagined. It is not merely a question of turning the tables or changing the language — Nina Power

All we can do is to prepare for a universal language that will go on changing for ever. We don't know everything. We aren't final. I wish we could make that statement a part of the Fundamental Law. — H.G.Wells

The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a — Lyndsay Faye

Screenwriting involves an often un-personal process. Co-writers, directors, producers, everyone has a say in what you put on a page, and stories are constantly changing according to budget, actors, and commercial needs. Films are a collaborative process and are also inherently narrative and structured, so you are always working within very tight parameters. Short fiction unleashes a more intimate voice and a passion for language. I believe short narratives can have the same amount of danger and drama as any action film. — Chiara Barzini

A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase "I love you" is like "the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name." Just as the Argo's parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase "I love you," its meaning must be renewed by each use, as "the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new. — Maggie Nelson

The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion. — William Safire

This world is what we have made of it. If it is ruthless today it is because we have made it ruthless by our attitudes. If we change ourselves we can change the world, and changing ourselves begins with changing our language and methods of communication — Arun Gandhi

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating. — Gilbert Highet