Motivational Quotes

Language

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

- Burgess, Anthony

Best Quotes about Language

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.

Benchley, Robert

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Sir Winston Churchill

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Baudrillard, Jean

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

10.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

11.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

13.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

14.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

16.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

17.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

18.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

19.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

20.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

21.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

22.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

23.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

24.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

25.

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

26.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

27.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

29.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

30.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

31.

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

32.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

33.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

34.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

35.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

36.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

37.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

38.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

39.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

40.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

41.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

42.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

43.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

44.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

45.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

46.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

47.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

48.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

49.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

50.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Man, Paul De