Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

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

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

13.

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

Pancoast, Mal

14.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

19.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

20.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

21.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

22.

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

Aprocrypha

23.

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

Artaud, Antonin

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Lewis Thomas

27.

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

Samuel Johnson

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

30.

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

31.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Charles V

35.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

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

38.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

39.

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

Heine, Heinrich

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Burchfield, Robert

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

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.

45.

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

William Butler Yeats

46.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

47.

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

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

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

50.

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

Abigail Adams