Motivational Quotes

Language

High thoughts must have high language.

- Aristophanes

Best Quotes about Language

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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

Lewis Thomas

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

William Shakespeare

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

Burchfield, Robert

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

10.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

11.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

12.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

13.

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

14.

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

Cioran, E. M.

15.

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

William Butler Yeats

16.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

18.

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

19.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

20.

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

21.

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

Heidegger, Martin

22.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

23.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

24.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Cooper, James F.

25.

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

26.

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

Will, George F.

27.

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

Samuel Johnson

28.

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

Abraham Lincoln

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

William Shakespeare

32.

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

33.

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

34.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

35.

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

Benchley, Robert

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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.

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

Ingrid Bengis

44.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

45.

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

Artaud, Antonin

46.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

47.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Heine, Heinrich