Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Aprocrypha

Best Quotes about Language

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

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

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

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

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Orwell, George

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

Lewis Thomas

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

Abigail Adams

10.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

11.

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

Robert Benchley

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

Ingrid Bengis

15.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

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

17.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

18.

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

19.

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

Charles V

20.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

21.

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

Herman Melville

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Abraham Lincoln

26.

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

27.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

28.

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

Will, George F.

29.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

30.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

33.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

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

35.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

40.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

41.

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

42.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

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.

44.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

45.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Burchfield, Robert

49.

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

Pancoast, Mal

50.

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