Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Bachelard, Gaston

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

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

Lewis Thomas

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

Will, George F.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

10.

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

11.

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

12.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

13.

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

Orwell, George

14.

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

Benchley, Robert

15.

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

16.

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

Cioran, E. M.

17.

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

18.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

19.

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

20.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Cooper, James F.

24.

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

25.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

26.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

27.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28.

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.

29.

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

Hoban, Russell

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Robert Benchley

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

37.

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

38.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

39.

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

40.

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

Samuel Johnson

41.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

42.

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

43.

Orwell, George

44.

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

William Butler Yeats

45.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

46.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

49.

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

50.

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