Motivational Quotes

Language

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

- Ammianus, Marcellinus

Best Quotes about Language

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

William Shakespeare

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

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.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

10.

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

Abigail Adams

11.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

12.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

13.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Herman Melville

18.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

19.

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

Robert Benchley

20.

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

Cioran, E. M.

21.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

22.

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

Hoban, Russell

23.

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

24.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

25.

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

Cooper, James F.

26.

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

27.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

32.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

33.

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.

34.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

35.

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

Artaud, Antonin

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Orwell, George

40.

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

Samuel Johnson

41.

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

42.

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

Charles V

43.

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

44.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

45.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

50.

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

Burchfield, Robert