Languages Quotes

See also Language Quotes

Everyone on the set has a mobile phone, and I found by pushing a few buttons, they could be programmed into different languages. I fixed Robbie`s (Coltrane) to speak in Turkish.

- Daniel Radcliffe

On acting: "I`m taking it day by day. Right now I like acting, but if something else sparks my interest in college, I`ll do that. It`s so limiting to say, this is it for the rest of my life. There are so many things that interest me: I love math, science, literature, languages."

- Natalie Portman

I have a good ear for languages.

- Harry Dean Stanton

Even in India the Hindi film industry might be the best known but there are movies made in other regional languages in India, be it Tamil or Bengali. Those experiences too are different from the ones in Bombay.

- Aishwarya Rai

I`ve had a very interesting career. I get to do amazing things and work with amazing people and travel and learn languages - things most people don`t get the opportunity to do.

- Gwyneth Paltrow

My wife wanted my children to have some Chinese culture and education. She believes the children need to learn two languages and two cultures.

- Jet Li

Obviously, nobody wants to touch something filmed in two dead languages. They think I`m crazy, and maybe I am. But maybe I`m a genius.

- Mel Gibson

I never found accents difficult, after learning languages.

- Vivien Leigh

England is very interested as well, and other countries if I could speak the languages!

- Miranda Otto

In Europe, kids learn at least four languages before they`re out of high school. But our education system is so underfunded, they go to school to buy heroin and an AK (-47 assault rifle).

- Eddie Griffin

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

I wish I had time to learn all the languages of our country, I wish I knew how to play a musical instrument. There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.

- Amitabh Bachchan

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.

- Frank Capra

`I wish life was not so short,` he thought. `Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.`

- J.R.R. Tolkien

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you`re finished, you`ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let`s look at the bird and see what it`s doing -- that`s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

- Richard Feynman

It made me think about a whole area of human activity that was not really a concern to me before that, because I was involved in reading Chinese history, or languages, or whatever.

- Ron Silver

But thinking of cinema being a dinosaur, you know what they say about dinosaurs: the brain dies but it takes maybe several weeks before that message gets to the tail. So if we`re lucky, maybe, the notion of conventional celluloid cinema has perhaps one or two generations to run. But then I`m sure, quite happily, we`ll see the end of it. I would cry no tears for it because I`m quite convinced, and there`s no reason not to think this, that all the new languages will certainly be soon giving us, I won`t say cinema because I think we have to find a new name for it, but cinematic experiences, which is going to make Star Wars look like an early sixteenth century lantern-slide lecture.

- Peter Greenaway

(The Pillow Book) The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages - English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian ... and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker`s check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music ... a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures.

- Peter Greenaway

How sad it will be if in three or four centuries all that is spoken in the world is English, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, Japanese and a handful of European languages, ... We will also lose much healing knowledge and much conservation knowledge embedded in indigenous cultures.

- Paul Cox

I start by using Chinese and many of the sounds of other languages are similar.

- Andy Lau

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

- Natalie Barney

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

- Karl Lagerfeld

The collapse in languages is a catastrophe. The Government is going to have to reverse its policy of allowing students to opt out at 14.

- David Hart

No instance exists of a person`s writing two languages perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.

- Thomas Jefferson

The Secretary of Education will decide which languages will be deemed critical to national security. My hunch is Spanish will not be one of them.

- Andrea Baker

Well, maybe so, although I don`t think I am particularly gifted in languages. In fact, oddly enough, it may have something to do with my being slow at languages.

- Robert Fitzgerald

NewSong is an opportunity to expand the number of worship languages spoken in our church family. We want to reach out to people for whom a more traditional worship style seems like an alien tongue.

- Howard Clark

Our English for Speakers of Other Languages wait list averages about 400 and we update it once a month. In our pre-GED program, we get 80-100 applications per month throughout the year. People can be on the wait list for too long. We don`t have enough to meet the demand.

- Don Edwards

The Bible was written in several languages, embraces many literary forms, and reflects cultures very different from our own. These are important considerations for properly understanding the Bible in its context.

- Troy Perry

The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury.

- John Bright

I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.

- Suzanne Farrell

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

- Naguib Mahfouz

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

- Emma Bonino

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

- Adam Haynes

English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.

- Ahmad Fawzi

Languages are true analytical methods.

- Al Bricker

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

- Al Hubbard

Support for alternate languages will largely depend on the underlying OS.

- Al Skinner

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining.

- Al Tompkins

I encourage people to consider the two languages according to their design criteria and not just in the context of commercial rivalries.

- Al Tompkins

I can`t recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.

- Alan Sypert

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

- Alex Garwood

I have visited forty-eight different tribes, the greater part of which I found speaking different languages, and containing in all 400,000 souls.

- Alex Lenahan

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

- Alex Morrison

If your kids attend school and grades are up that will make $1,000 contributions to some 10,000 kids across the country, are challenging kids to learn foreign languages or challenging kids to get summer jobs or seek summer enrichment opportunities?

- Alexander Hamilton

As the president of Kosovo, I am more concerned about the current situation with the employment standing at around 70 % of the population, which is young, with great potential, speaking many foreign languages and having wide expertise.

- Alexis Dupuy

I woke up find a rather noisy multi-lingual meeting going on. This was great as everyone could participate and even though everything had to be translated into about four different languages it never became boring. After a while the meeting broke up and everyone went for food.

- Alicia Molik

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.

- Allan Schweyer

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

- Allen Floyd

I have a high regard for Native languages and the pivotal role they have played in our nation`s history.

- Anabella Hedman