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

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.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Robert Benchley

10.

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

Heine, Heinrich

11.

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

12.

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

Orwell, George

13.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Man, Paul De

14.

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

15.

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

Abraham Lincoln

16.

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

Will, George F.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

21.

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

Herman Melville

22.

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

Burchfield, Robert

23.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

24.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

25.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

26.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

27.

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

28.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

29.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

30.

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

Lewis Thomas

31.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

32.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

33.

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

Pancoast, Mal

34.

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

35.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

36.

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

Artaud, Antonin

37.

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

Heidegger, Martin

38.

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

Samuel Johnson

39.

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

40.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

41.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

42.

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

Benchley, Robert

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Sir Winston Churchill

50.

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

Cioran, E. M.