Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Abigail Adams

Best Quotes about Language

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

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.

Cioran, E. M.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

10.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

11.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

12.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

13.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

14.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

15.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

16.

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?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

17.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

18.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

19.

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

Samuel Johnson

20.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

21.

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

22.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Steiner, George

23.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

24.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

25.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

26.

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

Lewis Thomas

27.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

29.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

33.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

34.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

35.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Will, George F.

36.

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

37.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

38.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

39.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

40.

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

Abraham Lincoln

41.

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

Herman Melville

42.

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.

Tolkien, J. R.

43.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

44.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

45.

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

46.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Dworkin, Andrea

47.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

48.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

Daniel, Samuel

49.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Porter, Katherine Anne

50.

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