Motivational Quotes

Language

High thoughts must have high language.

- Aristophanes

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

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

10.

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

Heidegger, Martin

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

15.

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

Artaud, Antonin

16.

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

17.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Abraham Lincoln

21.

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

22.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

23.

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

24.

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

25.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

31.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

34.

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

35.

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

Ingrid Bengis

36.

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

Cioran, E. M.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

40.

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

Rita Mae Brown

41.

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

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

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

Burchfield, Robert

44.

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

Abigail Adams

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Pancoast, Mal

48.

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

49.

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

William Butler Yeats

50.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell