Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Best Quotes about Language

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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

Will, George F.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

10.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

12.

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

13.

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

William Butler Yeats

14.

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

15.

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

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.

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

18.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

23.

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

24.

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

Burchfield, Robert

25.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

26.

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

Herman Melville

27.

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

Orwell, George

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

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

32.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

33.

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

34.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

35.

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

Robert Benchley

36.

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

37.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

38.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

39.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

40.

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

41.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

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

Heine, Heinrich

44.

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

Samuel Johnson

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

47.

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

Abraham Lincoln

48.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

49.

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

50.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.