Octavio Paz Quotes

No one has to learn to spell to talk, right? You see a little kid holding a conversation with an adult. He probably doesn't know the words he's saying, but he knows where to fit them to make what he's thinking logical to what you're saying.

If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool.

Since I learned English, I've become a motormouth!

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

When younger, I thought one of the particulars of being "Homo sapiens" was to communicate. I have not learned not to, though I am cautious when I try.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

In the first year of a child's life we teach them to walk and talk. And then for the rest of their lives we want them to sit down and be quiet.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

I learned English in one month. I told myself I should listen. In the next month I could talk to everyone. I was so happy because I could do one thing...I could talk.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

We always speak well when we manage to be understood.

That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.

Silence is terrible and painful only to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to those who never had anything to say— to them silence is simple and easy.

And then all of a sudden, you're doing jumping jacks, you're happy, because Kane can talk. The Big Red Retard can finally speak.

Why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?

Two of the biggest conversational blunders you can make are saying something when you should stay silent, and staying silent when you should say something.

Listen twice as much as you speak.

Learn the Arabic language; it will sharpen your wisdom.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.