Motivational Quotes

Language

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

William Shakespeare

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Heine, Heinrich

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

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

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

10.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

11.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

12.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

14.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Artaud, Antonin

15.

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

Aprocrypha

16.

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.

17.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

18.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

19.

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

Abraham Lincoln

20.

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

Samuel Johnson

21.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

22.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

23.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

24.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

25.

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

26.

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

Cioran, E. M.

27.

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

28.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

29.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

30.

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

Benchley, Robert

31.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

32.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

36.

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

37.

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

38.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

39.

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

40.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

41.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

42.

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

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

45.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

46.

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

47.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

48.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

49.

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

50.

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