Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Aprocrypha

Best Quotes about Language

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

William Shakespeare

When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Ricks, Christopher

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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.

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

Aprocrypha

10.

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

11.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

12.

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

Lewis Thomas

13.

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

Heidegger, Martin

14.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

15.

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

16.

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

Charles V

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

21.

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

Samuel Johnson

22.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

23.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

28.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Joyce, James

32.

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

Abraham Lincoln

33.

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

Pancoast, Mal

34.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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.

37.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

38.

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

39.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

40.

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

Hoban, Russell

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

44.

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

William Butler Yeats

45.

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 squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

46.

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

Rita Mae Brown

47.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

48.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

49.

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

50.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne