Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Abraham Lincoln

Best Quotes about Language

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

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

Abraham Lincoln

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

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

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

11.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

13.

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.

William Shakespeare

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Will, George F.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

24.

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

William Shakespeare

25.

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

26.

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

Lewis Thomas

27.

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

Charles V

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.

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

30.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

31.

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

32.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

33.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

35.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Cooper, James F.

36.

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

37.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

38.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

39.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

41.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

42.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

43.

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

Herman Melville

44.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

46.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

William Butler Yeats