Babel Quotes

1. "As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God's anger; but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex."
Author: Adam Sedgwick

2. "With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage."
Author: Andrei Codrescu

3. "Sa fie atunci numele primitive tot una cu cele date de zei, iar numele derivate opera oamenilor? Si sa fie hotarul dintre ele marcat de hotarul despartitor al Turnului Babel? (pp.19-20)"
Author: Andrei Ple?u

4. "Literatura e un Turn Babel de hartie;fiecare carte o treapta,fiecare biblioteca un etaj.Numai ca literatura are o tinta mai modesta,dar si mai dificila:sa ajunga la inima oamenilor."
Author: Andrei Ple?u

5. "There are the further difficulties of building a population out of a diversity of races, each at a different stage of cultural evolution, some in need of restraint, many in need of protection; everywhere a bewildering Babel of tongues."
Author: Arthur Keith

6. "The Tower of Babel"...The undersigned citizens, being artists, painters, sculptors, architects, and others devoted to and desirous preserving the amenities of Paris, wish to protest, in the name of our national good taste, against such an erection in the very heart of our city, as the monstrous and useless Eiffel Tower, already christened... " The Tower of Babel"...How much longer is the City of Paris to be a play-ground for these barbarous and sordid imaginations which disfigure and dishonor her? For the Eiffel Tower, which even commercially minded America rejected, is a public dishonor to our city. All our historic buildings, our monuments of rare and appealing beauty, are dwarfed and humiliated by this monstrous apotheosis of the factory chimney whose odious shadow will lie over the city...--Plea to the Exposition Director in opposition to the Eiffel Tower, signed by artists and writers and published in Le Temps, 1887"
Author: Carol McCleary

7. "PERHAPS, AND THIS IS WHERE MY BREATH CATCHES IN MY THROAT, PERHAPS SHE LET HERSELF FALL. THE DAY WAS HERS TO CHOOSE AND PERHAPS IN THAT TREETOP MOMENT WHEN SHE LOOKED DOWN AND SAW THE YARD, THE WORLD, HER LIFE, SPREAD OUT BELOW HER, PERHAPS SHE CHOSE TO PLUNGE TOWARD IT HEADLONG. PERHAPS SHE SAW BEFORE HER A LIFETIME OF WALKING ON THE RUINED EARTH AND CHOSE, INSTEAD, A SINGLE MOMENT IN THE AIR." - THE DOGS OF BABEL, PG. 79"
Author: Carolyn Parkhurst

8. "There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair"
Author: Dante Alighieri

9. "The Babel fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish."
Author: Douglas Adams

10. "Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.""But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.""Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."
Author: Douglas Adams

11. "The anecdote appears in Théophile Gautier's 1859 biography of Balzac. I wondered if it could be shown that Babel had read Gautier. Then I wondered whether there was anything to eat at home. There wasn't. I got in my car and was driving down El Camino Real when my cell phone started ringing."
Author: Elif Batuman

12. "En la confusión los linderos de las palabras se nos han borrado y ya estamos en plena torre de Babel. Ya no distinguimos dónde está la decencia y dónde la delincuencia. Ya no distinguimos a la víctima del victimario. Se nos enloqueció la semántica."
Author: Fernando Vallejo

13. "As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would have at once become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

14. "The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man."
Author: George Steiner

15. "Everyone seemed eager to talk at once, and the result was Babel. A"
Author: H.G. Wells

16. "Whatever truths or fables you may find in a thousand books, it is all a tower of Babel unless love holds it together."
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

17. "Therefore, the very large department store should not be viewed as a sinful undertaking, as, for example, the Tower of Babel. It is, rather, proof of the inability of the human race of today to be extravagant. It even builds skyscrapers: and the consequence this time isn't a great flood, but just a shop..."
Author: Joseph Roth

18. "We should expect nothing less from the language that was originally given by God, to His human family. Hebrew was the method that God chose for mankind to speak to Him, and Him to them. Adam spoke Hebrew—and your Bible confirms this. Everyone who got off the ark spoke one language—Hebrew. Even Abraham spoke Hebrew. Where did Abraham learn to speak Hebrew? Abraham was descended from Noah's son, Shem. (Ge 11:10-26) Shem's household was not affected by the later confusion of languages, at Babel. (Ge 11:5-9) To the contrary, Shem was blessed while the rest of Babel was cursed. (Ge 9:26) That is how Abraham retained Hebrew, despite residing in Babylon.So, Shem's language can be traced back to Adam. (Ge 11:1) And, Shem (Noah's son) was still alive when Jacob and Esau was 30 years of age. Obviously, Hebrew (the original language) was clearly spoken by Jacob's sons. (Ge 14:13)"
Author: Michael Ben Zehabe

19. "One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms."
Author: Mirra Ginsburg

20. "Setting the stage for the Tower of Babel, the author says that, while humanity had a mission to reflect God, it had been distracted by its own reflection and was both fascinated and fearful of what it saw."
Author: N.T. Wright

21. "Turnul Babel s-a nascut din ideea gresita ca misterul ar fi un vânat oarecare, iar metafizica o simpla problema de altitudine."
Author: Octavian Paler

22. "Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

23. "Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!"
Author: Ray Bradbury

24. "Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I've been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there's a story. And that's what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I'm in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did."
Author: Ray Bradbury

25. "I've seen 'Babel' four times. And each time I realize anew what a monumental project that had been for me."
Author: Rinko Kikuchi

26. "... I see the green earth covered with the works of man or with the ruins of men's work. The pyramids weigh down the earth, the tower of Babel has pierced the sky, the lovely temples and the gray castles have fallen into ruins. But of all those things which hands have built, what hasn't fallen nor ever will fall? Dear friends, throw away the trowel and mortarboard! Throw your masons' aprons over your heads and lie down to build dreams! What are temples of stone and clay to the soul? Learn to build eternal mansions of dreams and visions!"
Author: Selma Lagerlöf

27. "By validating and aggregating the best material from a wide range of independent and mainstream content owners, Babelgum aims to encourage common interest communities that are not well served by traditional television."
Author: Silvio Scaglia

28. "He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out."
Author: Virginia Woolf

Babel Quotes Pictures