Motivational Quotes

Language

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

- Ammianus, Marcellinus

Best Quotes about Language

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

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Robert Benchley

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

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

Aprocrypha

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

13.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

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

Pancoast, Mal

19.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

20.

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

Hoban, Russell

21.

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

22.

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

Rita Mae Brown

23.

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

24.

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

Will, George F.

25.

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

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.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

35.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

36.

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

37.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

38.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

39.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

40.

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

41.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

42.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

44.

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

45.

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

46.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

47.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

48.

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

49.

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

William Shakespeare

50.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee