Plain Language Quotes

To repeat: we can tolerate existence only if we believe - in accord with a complex of
illusions, a legerdemain of impenetrable deception - that we are not what we are. We are creatures with consciousness, but we must suppress that consciousness lest it break us with a sense of being in a universe without direction or foundation. In plain language, we cannot live with ourselves except as impostors. ~ Thomas Ligotti

This involves a lengthy restatement, in plain language, of the point made in more Hegelian terms in the Grundrisse. The dual nature of commodities, which can be seen as use-values or exchange-values, affects labour too. What is special about labour, though, is that it is the measure of exchange-value. ~ Anonymous

The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.
Physics and Philosophy ~ Werner Heisenberg

In plain language, we cannot live except as self-deceivers who must lie to ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our unwinnable situation in this world. ~ Thomas Ligotti

He lives in a world where where people want their share of pain measured, labelled, packaged,with its ingredients identified in plain language. They want it to come with an expiry date and a guarantee that there is this and no more ~ Mohammed Hanif

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words. ~ Hippocrates

Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress
in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news. ~ Ken Wilber

And for her, now, replaced by the plain language of the dogs, who in a few syllables have everything to say. ~ Cleopatra Mathis

If you can't describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven't got a plan. 'But,' people may say, 'I've got a complex strategy. It can't be reduced to a page.' That's nonsense. That's not a complex strategy. It's a complex thought about the strategy. ~ Lawrence Bossidy

But true philosophic demonstration will contribute to the profit not of the listeners' tongues, but of their minds. And, in my opinion, he who is solicitous about truth ought not to frame his language with artfulness and care, but only to try to express his meaning as he best can. ~ Clement Of Alexandria

I remember my parents fought all the time. They were not angry people but they were always angry around each other, with each other, and, as a child, I always thought it was because they were different from each other and they wanted different things. My mother wanted a life in the city among shops and restaurants. My father was happiest when he was alone, away from everyone and everything. This was what I saw. What I didn't see, and why my father could have told in simple, plain language, was that he and my mother didn't love each other. They never hand, and this not only destroyed them but it destroyed us children, ripped our world asunder and tore us apart. ~ Vaddey Ratner

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience. ~ Neil Postman

Nevertheless, should you have any doubts that we are stating sound doctrines, look up the references and see exactly what the Bible says and believe it in preference to any man. You cannot go wrong with this kind of advice. But in doing this, be sure you adhere to what is written, and that you do not let preconceived ideas cause you to be biased on any point. Do not try to make the Bible conform to your ideas. Always reconcile your ideas to the Bible. Let the plain language of the references given be read and understood in the same literal way that we would understand similar statements in any other book ~ Finis Jennings Dake

It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost. ~ Thomas Paine

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words. ~ George Eliot

Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of them
was hurt or molested by our band. ( ... )
The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon
their rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, and
we the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protect
their property.
How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right
look like wrong, and wrong like right. ~ Black Hawk

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on ~ C.S. Lewis

The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places - under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary ... ~ Eric Gamalinda

The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they refused to adopt the Arabic language, and it's a great point of pride to them that Persian culture and the Persian language and Persian literature survived the conversion to Islam. And the conversion to Islam also was for most of them not the Sunni majority form, but the Shia one. So there's a great discrepancy between Iranian society and many other of what we think of as Arab Muslim States and systems. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Reason functions as a basis of responsibility before God precisely because of its ability to serve in the instigation, nurture, and correction of faith. Because of this ability, we are responsible before God if we do not abide according to its results. To disparage the role of reason in the production and sustenance of faith is to contradict the plain intent of the scriptures, according to which reason provides adequate grounds to support a right worship of God. ~ Dallas Willard

Correct English is the slang of prigs ... ~ George Eliot

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it. ~ Theodor Adorno

I use the [vulgar] words because apparently these words do not corrupt morally. I'm from the street in New York, hung around in a tough neighborhood. It was common to curse, you make your point. It's a very effective language. I try not to overdo it. It's never to shock. I know where it fits, it's never to shock. There's no shock value left in words. ~ George Carlin

<<<<<---All Language Is Defined by The Spirit---->>>> ~ Paul De Aragon

Someone gave me the Love Languages book, and that has been the best book I've ever read about relationships and has helped me the most. ~ Kristin Cavallari

Miss Bingley was very deeply mortified by Darcy's marriage; but as she thought it advisable to retain the right of visiting at Pemberley, she dropt all her resentment; was fonder than ever of Georgiana, almost as attentive to Darcy as heretofore, and paid off every arrear of civility to Elizabeth.

Pemberley was now Georgiana's home; and the attachment of the sisters was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able to love each other, even as well as they intended. Georgiana had the highest opinion in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with an astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive manner of talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open pleasantry. Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in her way. By Elizabeth's instructions she began to comprehend that a woman may take liberties with her husband which a brother will not always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself.

Lady Catherine was extremely indignant on the marriage of her nephew; and as she gave way to all the genuine frankness of her character, in her reply to the letter which announced its arrangement, she sent him language so very abusive, especially of Elizabeth, that for some time all intercourse was at an end. But at length, by Elizabeth's persuasion, he was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a recon ~ Jane Austen

He who knows other languages feels even closer to his own language. ~ Kato Lomb

You are walking across a plain when you suddenly encounter a wall. The wall is infinitely tall and extends infinitely deep underground. It stretches infinitely to the left and infinitely to the right. What is it?
-Death ~ Cixin Liu

In almost any aspect of our social lives, the ability to interpret accurately the signals of body language, and to manage the impression we are giving to others, may be critical to our success, or even our survival. ~ Glen Wilson

No language can express the power, and beauty, and heroism, and majesty of a mother's love. It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over wastes of worldly fortunes sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The reason is that the English language treats a changing entity (a loaded wagon, sprayed roses, a painted door) in the same way that it treats a moving entity (pitched hay, sprayed water, slopped paint). A state is conceived as a location in a space of possible states, and change is equated with moving from one location to another in that state-space. In this way, locative constructions illustrate a second discovery in the hidden world down the rabbit hole, the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language. ~ Steven Pinker

But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?" I asked, for no good reason. "Is Jorge right?" "Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave ... ~ Umberto Eco

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture. ~ Moshe Sharett

I am convinced that music really is the universal language of beauty which can bring together all people of good will on earth ~ Pope Benedict XVI

'Paradise Lost' was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully. ~ Robert Hass

I would like to make it very plain that these are learnings which have significance for me. I do not know whether they would hold true for you. I have no desire to present them as a guide for anyone else. Yet I have found that when another person has been willing to tell me something of his inner directions this has been of value to me, if only in sharpening my realization that my directions are different. ~ Carl R. Rogers

My love translated sounds like a dead language. ~ Salma Deera

This is a Personal Poem

My self's self is thinking about itself.
Trying to sell its self a new self.

Don't worry, reader,
I'm not trying to fool you with language,

I have eyes to do that with.
I have forgotten our history,

I have forgotten how we met.
Reader, are you upset at how fast we're moving?

I'm likely with you in your bed,
between your hands, somewhere

in your mouth before
whatever it is you'll say next.

Say yes and now and love too.
Say what did Judith Butler say when saying,

" … one is undone, in the face of the other,
by the touch, by the scent, by the feel,

by the prospect of the touch,
by the memory of the feel."

I want to know you, reader.
I want to know a lot of things.

Can we ever truly forget about ourselves?
Is every self a self that makes itself available to love?

Like death. And its kind availability.
Like language, reader,

would we still be so unhappy if we could escape it?
To name the namelessness that is love,

in what we read, and what we see,
and what are feelings really?

Facts or flaws,
or something tells me now

that I must leave you, reader.
It's not you, it's me.

We guess at why things end,
we ruin things, we start and stall,

and all all all we do
is want. ~ Alex Dimitrov

Sure. Whatever. She's all yours."
Daemon grinned. "That she is."
My hand was twitching to connect with his face. "I am not yours." A small part of me wanted his to deny my words, though.
"Shush it," he said, walking up to me.
"How about I shush it right up you - "
"Kitten, your language is so unladylike. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text. ~ Jonathan Galassi

The local cultures around the world that are carried by today's immigrant poor have been eroded by centuries of colonialism and are in danger of being extinguished by the onslaught of global capitalism's drive for commodified homogeneity. The church must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a "scattered" human family by nurturing diversity, and must reaffirm the Pentecostal vocation of native-language empowerment. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God's intervention is always subversive of the centralizing project of empire and always on the side of the excluded and outcast, the refugee and immigrant. The Spirit has busted out and busted up business as usual many times since Babel and Jerusalem, and she is waiting to do the same in our own time - if our tongues would but dare to loosen. ~ Ched Myers

But so long as we are occupied with any other object than God Himself there will be neither rest for the heart nor peace for the mind. But when we receive all that enters our lives as from His hand, then, no matter what may be our circumstances or surroundings - whether in a hovel, a prison, a dungeon, or a martyr's stake - we shall be enabled to say, "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places" (Psa 16:6). But that is the language of faith, not of sight or of sense. ~ Arthur W. Pink

There is something else I must confess about Tata Boanda: he's a sinner. Right in the plain sight of God he has two wives, a young and an old one. Why, they all come to church! Father says we're to pray for all three of them, but when you get down to the particulars it's hard to know exactly what outcome to pray for. He should drop one wife, I guess, but for sure he'd drop the older one, and she already looks sad enough as it is. The younger one has all the kids, and you can't just pray for a daddy to flat-out dump his babies, can you? I always believed any sin was easily rectified if only you let Jesus Christ into your heart, but here it gets complicated.

Mama Boanda Number Two doesn't seem fazed by her situation. In fact, she looks like she's fixing to explode with satisfaction. She and her little girls all wear their hair in short spikes bursting out all over their heads, giving an effect similar to a pincushion (Rachel calls it the "haywire hairdo.") And Mama Boanda always wraps her pagne just so, with a huge pink starburst radiating across her wide rump. The women's long cloth skirts are printed so gaily with the oddest things: there is no telling when a raft of yellow umbrellas, or the calico cat and gingham dog, or an upside-down image of the Catholic Pope might just go sauntering across our yard. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Not the ones speaking the same language, but the ones sharing the same feeling understand each other. ~ Rumi

On the whole, we think that the greatest victories are yet to be won, the greatest deeds yet to be done, and that there are yet in store for our peoples, and for the causes that we uphold, grander triumphs than have ever yet been scored. But be this as it may, we gladly agree that the one plain duty of every man is to face the future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store for him, turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play his part manfully, as a man among men. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

I actually prefer it if I don't know what I'm supposed to do. If you've got an equal temperament piano keyboard, then you know what you're going to get if you play certain chords. But I actually like it if you don't know where the notes are, because then you do it intuitively. You're working out a new language, basically. New rules. ~ Aphex Twin

Don't be afraid of a little metaphor; it won't bite you, but you should always make sure you know how to cash it in for unvarnished fact when you feel the urge. ~ Daniel C. Dennett

There is one only living and true God, without body, parts, or passions; consisting of three persons - the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

It is painful to the human mind to be compelled to admit, that such wonderful inconsistencies of language or ideas, have ever found place in any human creed. Yet, so it is. ~ Parley P. Pratt

What unknown abilities had filled this void? Was the world somehow brighter, more tangible, without the nagging interference of language? Was the absence of words actually a form of freedom? I've often tried to quiet that constant voice in my mind, to try to experience the world the way they might - but always the questions rush in faster than I can carve out a moment of true silence. ~ Eli Horowitz

I've been in situations like in Tokyo where people sang my song word for word and then when the music stopped, they couldn't speak to me. I've seen the music break the language barrier. ~ Curtis Jackson

Hearing again the words from the Gullah woman, All shut-eye ain't sleep; all good-bye ain't gone. ~ Karen White

There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast he gets into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes s twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it. His hands are growing weaker and he feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him above or below, but still he clings on. Then he sees that two mice, a black one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon's jaws. The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue and licks them. So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment. I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I hung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet. I only ~ Leo Tolstoy

I am just a plain, common man. ~ Nicholas II Of Russia

It happens, therefore, that readers of the book, or of any other book built about a central concept, fall into three mutually exclusive classes:

(I) The class of those who miss the central concept-(I have known a learned historian to miss it) -not through any fault of their own,-they are often indeed well meaning and amiable people,-but simply because they are not qualified for conceptual thinking save that of the commonest type.

(II) The class of those who seem to grasp the central concept and then straightway show by their manner of talk that they have not really grasped it but have at most got hold of some of its words. Intellectually such readers are like the familiar type of undergraduate who "flunks" his mathematical examinations but may possibly "pull through" in a second attempt and so is permitted, after further study, to try again.

(III) The class of those who firmly seize the central concept and who by meditating upon it see more and more clearly the tremendous reach of its implications. If it were not for this class, there would be no science in the world nor genuine philosophy. But the other two classes are not aware of the fact for they are merely "verbalists" In respect of such folk, the "Behaviorist" school of psychology is right for in the psychology of classes (I) and (II) there is no need for a chapter on "Thought Processes"- it is sufficient to have one on "The Language Habit. ~ Cassius Jackson Keyser

This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that Cellar Door is the most beautiful. ~ Donnie Darko

To be conservative at 20 is heartless and to be a liberal at 60 is plain idiocy. ~ Winston Churchill

The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something "meaningful," we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith

Fyodor Pavlovich, for example, began with practically nothing, was a landowner of the very least important category, went trotting around other people's dinner tables, aspired to the rank of sponge, but at the moment of his decease turned out to possess something to the tune of one hundred thousand roubles in ready money. And yet at the same time he had persisted all his life in being one of the most muddle-headed madcaps in the whole of our district. I repeat: here there was no question of stupidity; the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever - but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language - violence. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

If you want to know what's in motherhood for you, as a woman, then - in truth - it's nothing you couldn't get from, say, reading the 100 greatest books in human history; learning a foreign language well enough to argue in it; climbing hills; loving recklessly; sitting quietly, alone, in the dawn; drinking whisky with revolutionaries; learning to do close-hand magic; swimming in a river in winter; growing foxgloves, peas and roses; calling your mum; singing while you walk; being polite; and always, always helping strangers. No one has ever claimed for a moment that childless men have missed out on a vital aspect of their existence, and were the poorer, and crippled by it. ~ Caitlin Moran

Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you. ~ Dane Rudhyar