Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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.

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

Abigail Adams

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

Will, George F.

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

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

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

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

Orwell, George

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

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

10.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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.

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

13.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

14.

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

Hoban, Russell

15.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

16.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

17.

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

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

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

Pancoast, Mal

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

25.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

27.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

28.

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.

29.

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

William Butler Yeats

30.

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

Charles V

31.

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

Herman Melville

32.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

33.

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

34.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

35.

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

36.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

37.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

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

Rita Mae Brown

39.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

Cooper, James F.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

47.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

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

50.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur