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

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

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

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

Orwell, George

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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

10.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

11.

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.

12.

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

Heidegger, Martin

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.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

15.

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

16.

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

Artaud, Antonin

17.

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

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.

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

Benchley, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

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

23.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

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

Samuel Johnson

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

33.

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

William Butler Yeats

34.

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

Ingrid Bengis

35.

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

Aprocrypha

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Pancoast, Mal

42.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

43.

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

44.

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

Herman Melville

45.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

46.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

47.

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

48.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George