Motivational Quotes

Language

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

Best Quotes about Language

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

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

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

Robert Benchley

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

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

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

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

10.

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

11.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

12.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

Abigail Adams

16.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

17.

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

Artaud, Antonin

18.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

19.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

20.

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

Rita Mae Brown

21.

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

Heidegger, Martin

22.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

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

Cooper, James F.

27.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

William Shakespeare

31.

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.

32.

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

Samuel Johnson

33.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

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

35.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

39.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

40.

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

41.

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

42.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

43.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

48.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

49.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

50.

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