This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Moshé Feldenkreis, fully Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais
There are multiple descriptions of the same real world situation. The only justification for language is to empower yourself. If the verbal description you create of the situation you find yourself in leads to paralysis and ineffectual behaviour, then throw those damn words away and find yourself a new set. There is always some useful description of the world that empowers and gives you choices and your task, if you are going to use words at all, is to find that set of words.
Justification | Language | Words | World |
Whatever is highest and holiest is tinged with melancholy. The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.
N. Scott Momaday, fully Navarre Scott Momaday
In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.
N. Scott Momaday, fully Navarre Scott Momaday
Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.
Daily routine is a strategy which most settings have in use to empower children. The daily routine “provides a consistent, predictable sequence of events that gives children a sense of control over what happens in their day” . Different settings develop different routine depend how long children stay in the premises and their age, but most of the daily routine contain basic components such as: outside routine, large group time, small group time, register time, art/craft time, tidy up time and snack/meal time. During the daily routine the child learns to make choices and discovers their consequences. This creates sort of secure environment, because children know what to expect and this allows them to be more involve in the tasks and more co-operative with the practitioner. The second strategy is planning and providing different activities and experiences for children. This strategy is suggested by the EYFS because allows for adventure, exploration and gaining new experiences. Different activities, which the setting provide develop range of skills and abilities. Taking part in activities, free-flow or structured, allows children learn social interactions and behaviours such as sharing equipment, taking turns. Providing activities allows children to use their language to communicate wiliness to participation in it, raising their confidence to communicate and self reliance to complete it. Providing different activities stimulate children`s imagination, cognitive, language, personal, social and emotional as well as physical development and allow to fulfil children`s potential.
Children | Confidence | Control | Events | Language | Self | Sense | Time | Child | Learn |
Nathalie Sarraute, fully Nathalie Tcherniak Sarraute
What is hidden beneath the interior monologue an immense profusion of sensations, images, sentiments, memories, impulses, little larval actions that no inner language can convey, that jostle one another on the threshold of consciousness. .
Newt Gingrich, fully Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich, born Newton Leroy McPherson
We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one'sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
Tell him that we fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.
Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature.... A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts.
Language | Looks | Man | Present | Question | Understanding | Will |
Niels Bohr, fully Neils Henrik David Bohr
What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character ... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.
Character | Experience | Ideas | Language | Learn |
Nikki Giovanni, fully Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni
I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility.
Language | Listening | Understand |
Niels Bohr, fully Neils Henrik David Bohr
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Language |
Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
Laughter is the language of the soul.
Language |
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress.
Language |
I have the highest veneration of those Gentleman, -- but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of the confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one of great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.
Government | Language | People | Public | Right | Soul | Government |
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
Those who violate the rules of a language do not enter new territory; they leave the domain of meaningful discourse. Even facts in these circumstances dissolve, because they are shaped by the language and subjected to its limitations.
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.
Language | Little | Love | Metaphysics | People | Problems |