Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Benchley, Robert

Best Quotes about Language

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Hoban, Russell

10.

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

William Butler Yeats

11.

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

Benchley, Robert

12.

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

13.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

14.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

19.

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

Will, George F.

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

23.

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

24.

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

Cooper, James F.

25.

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

Ingrid Bengis

26.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

27.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

28.

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

Herman Melville

29.

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

Charles V

30.

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

31.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

32.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

33.

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

34.

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

Burchfield, Robert

35.

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

36.

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

Rita Mae Brown

37.

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

38.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

43.

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

44.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

Heidegger, Martin

46.

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

Artaud, Antonin

47.

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

48.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

49.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

50.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip