Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Best Quotes about Language

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

Orwell, George

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

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

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

17.

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

18.

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

William Butler Yeats

19.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

20.

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

Pancoast, Mal

21.

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.

22.

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

Burchfield, Robert

23.

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

Aprocrypha

24.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

25.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

29.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

30.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Rita Mae Brown

36.

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

37.

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

Heidegger, Martin

38.

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

Lewis Thomas

39.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

40.

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

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

43.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

44.

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

Will, George F.

45.

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

Abraham Lincoln

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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