To have another language is to possess a second soul. — Charlemagne
A different language is a different vision of life. — Federico Fellini
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence. — George Steiner
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. — Chinua Achebe
Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks. — Jose Rizal
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute. — J. G. Ballard
As many languages you know, as many times you are a human being — Tomas Garrigue Masaryk
European languages must not be considered diamonds displayed under a glass ball, dazzling us with their brilliance. — Cheikh Anta Diop
French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic. — Bernard Pivot
Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world. — Rumi
The internet is an amazing medium for languages. — David Crystal
Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world. — Hélder Câmara
I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them. — Madam C. J. Walker
For what it's worth, it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of and if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny. — Aristotle
So, transform yourself first… Because you are young and have dreams and want to do something meaningful, that in itself, makes you our future and our hope. Keep expanding your horizon, decolonize your mind, and cross borders. — Yuri Kochiyama
Now is the time to understand more, so we fear less. — Marie Curie
Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.
Men will surrender to the spirit of the age. They will say that if they had lived in our day, faith would be simple and easy. But in their day, they will say, things are complex; the Church must be brought up to date and made meaningful to the day's problems. — Anthony of Padua
Everything happens for a reason, but they all lessons. — Lil Boosie
Laughter is the fireworks of the soul. — Josh Billings
Love will find its way through all languages on its own.
Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you're put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling. — Vincent Van Gogh
Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life. — Anton Chekhov
I come from a place where people get high, the grades get low, and if someone has a secret EVERYONE KNOWS. — Wiz Khalifa
Modern English Quotes
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. — Mark Antony
I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own. — Jeffrey Eugenides
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. — Mark Twain
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language. — Daniel O'Connell
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them. — Terry Prachett
You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion. — John Ruskin
The ability to speak several languages is an asset, but the ability to keep your mouth shut in any language is priceless.
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them. — Terry Pratchett
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. — W. S. Merwin
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. — William Shakespeare
Look on education as something between the child's soul and God. Modern Education tends to look on it as something between the child's brain and the standardized test. — Charlotte Mason
The most important Christian Education institution is not the pulpit or the school, important as those institutions are; but it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work. — John Gresham Machen
In your silence, when there are no words, no language, nobody else is present, you are getting in tune with existence.
Education technology and school construction go together. Modernization, updating education facilities, and making a capital investment in education are all included. — Major Owens
Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. — Kofi Annan
Lots of literacy in modern society, but not enough numeracy. — Naval Ravikant
There are hundreds of languages around the world, but a smile speaks them all.
Modern education is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu. — Murray Gell-Mann
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples. — Carter G. Woodson
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. — Carl Sagan
I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps. — Walter Mosley
Modern History Quotes
Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots. — I. M. Pei
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent. — Henry David Thoreau
To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it. — Daniel Libeskind
Music is the universal language of mankind.
The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history. — Lawrence Summers
But the changes triggered by the rapid industrialization of farmed foods were severely damaging. Within just a few generations of eating this stuff, modern humans became the worst breathers in Homo history, the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. — James Nestor
American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe. — Harold Rosenberg
We all smile in the same language.
God is the ruler of history. His times are well chosen The Roman Empire was an instrument in his hand. And so are the nations of the modern world. — John Gresham Machen
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world. — Robert Penn Warren
I don't think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability that we're seeing right now. I think that was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of the United States. — Bernie Sanders
We are well aware that religion is not as bad an influence as it was a short time ago, as history is counted. But it is a sufficiently bad influence even in modern times, and its reduced viciousness (in practice) is due plainly enough to its reduced power. — E. Haldeman-Julius
I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. — Werner Heisenberg
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Paglia
It is noble in its administration: to think and let think, beyond the narrow contracted prejudices of bitter sectarians in these modern times. It is general or universal language, fitted to benefit the poor stranger, which no other institution is calculated to reach, by extending the beneficent hand. — Harry S. Truman
If I as a geologist were called upon to explain briefly our modern ideas of the origin of the earth and the development of life on it to a simple, pas- toral people, such as the tribes to whom the Book of Genesis was addressed, I could hardly do better than follow rather closely much of the language of the first chapter of Genesis. — Wallace Pratt
The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers. — James Ellroy
The language of theism which was familiar to the people, gave Gandhi the advantage of easy communication with the people, but it is atheistic in principle. It could have been the starting point for the atheistic movement in the modern age. — Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
As thy days, so shall thy strength be which, in modern language, may be translated as thy thoughts so shall thy life be. — Emmet Fox
The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists. — Alan Watts
Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. — Murray Gell-Mann
Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions. — Amos Oz
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy. — Anthony Burgess
The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing. — Richard Leakey
Modern women are just bombarded. There's nothing but media telling us we're all supposed to be great cooks, have great style, be great in bed, be the best mothers, speak seven languages, and be able to understand derivatives. And we don't really have women we're modeling after, so we're all looking for how to do this. — Jamie Lee Curtis
You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language. — Marina Abramovic
In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required. — W. H. Auden
I can tell you that in my modern life I enjoy language. I enjoy words, their meaning, what they sound like to the ear, what they sound like to the listener. I strive to write the perfect sentence in all that I do, and when I write [the] perfect sentence I know it. If I had a second life I'd be a librettist for Broadway musicals. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
I'm always fighting either to have a house work with us or to head a house. It's a lifestyle I can totally see: the future, modern Versailles, modern Versace, modern Calabasas, paparazzi, celebrity language. I just want to build a collection that's around me and my wife and my kids. — Kanye West
Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern. — Nelson Shanks
Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one. — Henry David Thoreau
Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today. — Edward R. Murrow
over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about? — May Sarton
People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. — Bill Watterson
Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush! — Agatha Christie
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike. — Martin Amis
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Anna Paglia
Derived from this celebrated society for propagating the faith, the name propaganda is applied in modern political language as a term of reproach to secret associations for the spread of opinions and principles which are viewed by most governments with horror and aversion. — W.T. Brande
We're caught in the pace of modern living - this emphasis on the "quick take," on the magazine that says it will take you eight minutes to read an article. It seems to me that here is a tendency that ought to be denied in part. Certain children do read in the past; they love the old language; they love the sound of words. I don't think it's good enough to say something is better because is it updated and modern. — Frances Clarke Sayers
People remember Longfellow wrote Hiawatha, quite forget he was a Professor of Modern Languages! — J. R. R. Tolkien
Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on. — John Dewey
For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work. — Don Delillo
Traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language and architecture and religion and work and family customs were consistent with one another, mutually explanatory and reinforcing. To grow into one implied a growth into others. — Ivan Illich
I think all experience is, in some way, shape or form, filtered down to help you, in your present moment. With Shakespeare, you're trying to act with a fairly archaic language, although in certain aspects, it's deeply modern. — Joseph Fiennes
For being able to use language was a critical skill that could carry one far. One could use it professionally, as a crafter of everything from political speeches to modern novels. One could use it personally, as a tool of discovery or a means of staying connected to others. One could use it as an outlet that would feed the artistic spirit of the creator, which existed in everyone. — Elizabeth George
I believe there is no liturgy in the world, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England. And though the main of it was compiled considerably more than two hundred years ago, yet is the language of it, not only pure, but strong and elegant in the highest degree. — John Wesley
I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income. — E. F. Schumacher
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. — Henry David Thoreau
In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books. — Thomas B. Macaulay
I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming. — William P. Young
Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological. — Roger Ebert
"Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound. — Lawrence Lessig
It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world. — Bill Nighy
Ancient and modern languages teem with happily expressed sentiments of more or less force and beauty, sufficiently individualized and excellent to warrant their reproduction and classification. — Maturin Murray Ballou
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of modern languages quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about modern languages to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of modern languages quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
